On 2022-Feb-13, Guyren Howe wrote: > I’m back to just having no earthly idea why anyone who finds relations > to be a productive tool for building a model would think that SQL > being the only means to do that is Okay. There are aspects other than technical reasons alone why some things live on while "better" things barely survive without thriving, or even die. For example, the fact that there are multiples companies furthering the development of the SQL language means that there's a group of engineers working to introduce improvements to the language after extensive discussions and exposure to requests from users. If Postgres decided to "fork" and go solitary with its own query language, it would by itself have to produce all the language improvements, or be left behind by the other products. And it takes a lot of effort to produce those improvements. Have you looked at how SQL changed from one version to the next? Another aspect is inertia. The amount of software products that rely on SQL is just too high. Suppose you came up with a technically-better language that has all the current capabilities of SQL. Do you think a majority of those products would immediately switch to the new language? My guess is no, they wouldn't, because the safe bet is that SQL will continue to work in 10, 20 years, while there is no certainty at all that your new language would. So by ditching SQL, Postgres would no longer be a database of choice for those products. So, while SQL may not be the greatest possible relational language possible, there are very good reasons for it to continue to be the language of choice. -- Álvaro Herrera PostgreSQL Developer — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
