An Alternative to SQL?

Golygydd Max writes "Dave Voorhis from the University of Derbyshire has developed a program incorporating Tutorial D, a language designed to overcome of the shortcomings of SQL, and developed some years ago by Hugh Darwen and Chris Date. Until now, no-one had done anything with it but Voorhis is hoping for wider adoption; although we think it would be like pushing water uphill though." Update: 10/13 12:43 GMT by T : An anonymous reader writes "It's being picky I know, but the university in question is in fact called The University Of Derby, not Derbyshire."

Comments

Re:shortcomings to sql?

[l810c]

One thing I always wondered was if there was a way to make a table that had a different number of columns for each row. For instance, if you wanted to insert ids from another table, but the number of ids each row would need is a variable ranging from zero to god knows what... Can SQL do that in a way that doesn't involve making a huge table with tons of columns or one big structure holding the ids separated by colons?

Yuck, you would never Want to do that. That's what relationships and foreign keys are for. You wouldn't populate your id's across columns, you put them in a new table, one row each, with an foreign key linking them back to main table.

It's not about optimization...

[Ayanami Rei]

this proposed language is like a superset of sql. It also sort mixes itself with PL/SQL-like constructs as well. I think it's rather novel and it could make your optimization tasks easier if you had access to something like this... less trying to think in terms of the language, more in terms of how you want to acutally manipulate the data.

This is _not_ a query builder. It's going back, looking at what relational algebra is, seeing what people do with SQL, and then making sure the language has all the idioms required to be "complete" and not arbitrary.