Elvis Pranskevichus on limitations in SQL and how EdgeQL can help

Structure Query Language (SQL), which was once considered “not a serious language” by its authors, has now become a dominant query language for relational databases in the industry. Its battle-tested solutions, stability, portability makes it a reliable choice to perform operations on your stored data.

However, it does has its share of weak points and that’s what Elvis Pranskevichus, founder of EdgeDB, listed down in a post titled “We Can Do Better Than SQL” published yesterday. He explained that we now need a “better SQL” and further introduced the EdgeQL language, which aims to address the limitations in SQL.

SQL’s shortcomings

Following are some of the shortcomings Pranskevichus talks about in his post:

“Lack of Orthogonality”

Orthogonality is a property, which means if you make some changes in one component, it will have no side effect on any other component. In the case of SQL, it means, allowing users to combine a small set of primitive constructs in a small number of ways. Orthogonality leads to a more compact and consistent design and not having it will lead to language which has many exceptions and caveats.

Giving an example, Pranskevichus wrote, “A good example of orthogonality in a programming language is the ability to substitute an arbitrary part of an expression with a variable, or a function call, without any effect on the final result.” SQL does not permit such type of generic substitution.

“Lack of Compactness”

One of the side effects of not being orthogonal is lack of compactness. SQL is also considered to be “verbose” because of its goal of being an English-like language for catering to “non-professions”.

“However, with the growth of the language, this verbosity has contributed negatively to the ability to write and comprehend SQL queries. We learnt this lesson with COBOL, and the world has long since moved on to newer, more succinct programming languages. In addition to keyword proliferation, the orthogonality issues discussed above make queries more verbose and harder to read,” wrote Pranskevichus in his post.

“Lack of Consistency”

Pranskevichus further adds that SQL is inconsistent in terms of both syntax and semantics. Additionally, there is a problem of standardization as well as different database vendors implement their own version of SQL, which often end up being incompatible with other SQL variants.

Introducing EdgeQL

With EdgeQL, Pranskevichus aims to provide users a language which is orthogonal, consistent, and compact, and at the same time works with the generally applicable relational model. In short, he aims to make SQL better!

EdgeQL basically considers every value a set and every expression a function over sets. This design of the language allows you yo factor any part of an EdgeQL expression into a view or a function without changing other parts of the query. It has no null and a missing value is considered to be an empty set, which comes with the advantage of having only two boolean logic states.

Read Pranskevichus’s original post for more details on EdqeQL.

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