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

submitted 1 year ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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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?

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[–] ursakhiin@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year 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.