Programming

17507 readers

8 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

Is there something better than SQL? (self.programming)

submitted 1 year ago by onlinepersona to c/programming

71 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If you're modeling relational data, it doesn't seem like you can get around using a DB that uses SQL, which to me is the worst: most programmers aren't DB experts and the SQL they output is quite often terrible.

Not to dunk on the lemmy devs, they do a good job, but they themselves know that their SQL is bad. Luckily there are community members who stepped up and are doing a great job at fixing the numerous performance issues and tuning the DB settings, but not everybody has that kind of support, nor time.

Also, the translation step from binary (program) -> text (SQL) -> binary (server), just feels quite wrong. For HTML and CSS, it's fine, but for SQL, where injection is still in the top 10 security risks, is there something better?

Yes, there are ORMs, but some languages don't have them (rust has diesel for example, which still requires you to write SQL) and it would be great to "just" have a DB with a binary protocol that makes it unnecessary to write an ORM.

Does such a thing exist? Is there something better than SQL out there?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] helloben 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have found that usually the problem isn’t SQL itself, it’s the design of the database or the application or both that makes it slow or hard to use because databases are tricky and it’s very easy to make them slow and difficult to optimize. This goes for any database, SQL or otherwise.

I think the reason that you see so many people use relational databases for relational data is that they were designed for it and have been optimized to do that job for almost 50 years at this point, the right tool for the job if you will. That’s also why I don’t think any language builds it in, there isn’t one type of database that is good at every scenario so it would be difficult to pick a default as a language. Also keep in mind, most large applications are deployed across many servers so anything that uses a local file is out of the question.

As far as performance directly though, I’m definitely not a DBA but I have spent a lot of time helping people troubleshoot slow databases and it seems many people write apps and design databases based only on how they want to store the data and not how the actual data is consumed. The other thing I think most folks don’t seem to realize (including myself for a long time) know the need for creating good indexes based on how you are accessing the data. It’s not an easy problem to solve for sure though.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Database optimization goes from the design of the schemas to the queries used to the configuration to the actual hardware it’s running on. It’s one of the hardest things to optimize in all of tech.