Could you say a bit more about what you'd like to see in a "reimagined" SQL? Are there any serious efforts to replace it?
There was a comment thread around here a week or two ago where someone pointed out it's kind of insane SQL has stuck around so long, and no one could point to any worthy potential replacements.
>There was a comment thread around here a week or two ago where someone pointed out it's kind of insane SQL has stuck around so long, and no one could point to any worthy potential replacements
SQL is based on relational algebra -- so it's the model with the best theoritical justification out there, even if the syntax could be improved.
It's the other ad-hoc solutions that is crazy that they keep getting suggested. SQL/RDBMS were invented because we had those (key stores etc, tree dbs) and they were crap.
Visual query tools like Tableau don't seem to be going away. I'd love to see an effective open-source alternative to Tableau that doesn't require scripting your own D3 website.
Butler Lampson makes the point (in a recent set of slides) that relations are a good base for DSLs: they have enough complexity to model graphs, functions, sets etc.
That thought has made me wonder if logic programmming has something to offer in the design of new APIs.
SQL in fact deviates from true relational theory, in which the "cells" of a table could themselves have additional structure rather than just being "a string" or "a number". Cells could also be truly absent. SQL's NULL, while something you can make your peace with, could use some tweaking with 21st century experience. SQL's syntax has acquired a lot of cruft over the years to deal with new features... in fact in that sense it reminds me of the evolution of OpenGL and the way it acquired extension after extension until finally it needed to be broken apart into Vulkan and CUDA pieces (to brutally summarize the situation to the point of inaccuracy; please try to see what I mean rather than pick nits with that).
More controversially, I question the entire intent of making the core query language something that is putatively declarative, but then in practice often requires extensive engine-specific annotations to tell the engine how to actually do the query. (More on that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3506345#3507281 ). I think RethinkDB's query language was much more imperative, because of the level of development resources they had, and I bet it actually worked out OK. However, even if I could not sell the development world on making SQL++/SQL-replacement non-declarative, we certainly could do a better job this time around of separating query strategy from query contents in some deliberate manner, rather than hacking crap up.
Imagine if, for instance, you could feed the query optimizer a query, get back a query plan that was actually manipulable and executable, tweak that to your tastes, and then send it back to the DB, rather than working via hints and circumlocutions and hopes and dreams.
It would also be nice if SQL were more composible. The serialized version of SQL is not practical to use string manipulations to combine two queries into a larger query. Many languages have libraries that permit this, but they're always second-class citizens. If I were redesigning SQL I'd want something that handled this more cleanly. I'd seriously consider something RethinkDB-esque in the sense that it didn't have an "english" serialization, but was purely symbolic, leaving it to language authors to figure out how to best represent it in the local language.
Also, bear in mind that most if not all features I describe in this post exist in databases already. (Not sure about that last one.) What I'm saying is that SQL integrates poorly with all that, not that the features don't exist. Recursive queries and common table expressions also seem ripe for some serious rethinking. Plus I think for a long time SQL really kinda limited the sort of DBs that would be produced because if a feature integrated poorly with SQL, it was a lot less likely to come out. (In particular, structured cells took IMHO forever to come out. Possibly the massive market failure of "object databases" also scared DB developers off from that feature too, though. They aren't the same thing but may be closely enough related.)
Most modern relational databases now allow the cells of a table to have additional structure through the use of SQL/XML. We can query into the contents of a cell using XQuery.
There was a comment thread around here a week or two ago where someone pointed out it's kind of insane SQL has stuck around so long, and no one could point to any worthy potential replacements.