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:What's the use?

[neurojab]

Have you ever seen a 25 way join or a 30 way UNION? I've seen queries that go past a given RDBMS's 32k query size limitation. Even worse, I've seen the code that GENERATES these horrendous queries. It's like seeing your parents having sex; it changes your life forever.

Please, please, there must be a sane way to query data from a highly normalized database.

Re:SQL is good for some things, but not for others

[glwtta]

I think you are confusing "SQL the language" with "MySQL the broken RDBMS implementation", both Postgres and Oracle can easily do what you want with hierarchies; as for user defined functions, support for those is implicit in most database systems (usually in a variety of languages, both SQL dialects and procedural).

I am not sure what's incosistent about the syntax you mentioned, but maybe that's just me. Though I'd be interested to see in what ways it is "very limited" (especially if those aren't the limitations of a particular databas engine, or relational databases in general).