Programming

17017 readers

560 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 !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

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

submitted 11 months ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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

[–] ursakhiin@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago

Even some of these issues ORMs are solving can be solved without them by caching a view of the data in structure of the object. Relational DBs are extremely well tuned for looking up and caching data in an easy to view manner.

Somebody else pointed out the problem is bad devs not learning their tools. I'd go so far as to say DB knowledge can (and was due a while) be a specialized field full of skills that will fall by the wayside for most devs because we aren't doing super complex things in a single DB anymore with the preference going toward microservices. There's no need to flex those skills and they depreciate over time.