It's unfair, but my first thought after reading the abstract was "oh great, another one".
There have been several languages claiming to fix SQL and none of them (to my knowledge, I'd love counter examples) have achieved widespread enough adoption to be named a proper successor.
Reasons I can guess:
- SQL's 50 years of entrenchment- all RDBMSs speak it! Most monitoring systems speak it! Any successor language needs a good interop story so people can use it with their existing systems.
- SQL is good enough for run of the mill day to day tasks- and these days by the time I'm lost in recursive queries or window functions, I can ask an LLM for help. Maybe a successor language can win on IDE support or other parts of the dev/agent experience
Successor languages also tend to only replace parts of SQL (usually the queries, not the insert/update stuff). I think PRQL does this (once again I'd love to be wrong). Now the dev has to learn two languages?
I guess my point is that a successor language, can't just fix the semantic issues with SQL, to be successful it also has to provide large ecosystem (and maybe political) steps up. I didn't see any of that in this abstract, which kills my excitement.
The only good reason is that SQL is the only main interface for most of the main DBs.
There is NOT other *good reason*.
P.D: But, why? Well, at first SQL was truly small. Then the cost of "just adding" something look easier than redo another lang.
TODAY, SQL is insanely bad and complex.
To the point that you can, literally, learn Rust faster than SQL.
Seriously! look for example how many reserved words you need to be aware of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SQL_reserved_words
P.D: I implement parts of the SQL support for a RDBMS. I think the teams expect >5 years to fully do it.
I bet is possible to implement Rust way faster than that (ie: I mean here for both: Parsing and correctly executing, not all optimization and other concerns)
Here is a whole seminar series on SQL alternatives https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjbpOIrZheFWxk...
It’s pretty interesting!
I think one part that is overlooked by people who want to replace sql, is just how popular sql is with programmers. Maybe its just me, but sql is one of my favourite languages that i deal with on a regular basis.
I think its similar to regex that way. There are deficiencies that are hard to objectively defend, but at the end of the day its something i enjoy using and gets the job done.
Add pure C to the list. I enjoy building things in it but boy what a horrible language it is.
I accept SQL as an industry standard,and i've been solely focusing on databases for th4 last decade or so, but it is such a horrible language nevertheless...