Re: Article on new mainframe use

On Fri, 23 Aug 2024 02:36:34 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 22 Aug 2024 15:59:34 -0500, BGB wrote:
>

Underused: It is a sensible way of structuring data, but needing to
interface with it though SQL strings is awkward and inefficient.

>
Actually, that works fine in any language with decent string handling.

I believe BGB was referring to how bad SQL is as a language.  It's
overly verbose, assymetric, context sensitive, uses synonyms to
distinguish context, etc.  Don Chamberlan and Ed Codd both have said
SQL's grammar simply grew rather than being planned, and that IBM
releasing it as it existed was a mistake.  But due to IBM's market
power, it caught on so quickly that there was no chance to fix or
refine the grammar.


Homework: read up on QUEL.
Factoid : SQL originally was called SEQUEL.

Or, do some weird OO thing where object methods exist for SQL keywords
and each method returns an object that can be used to glue on the next
keyword:
   res=db.select().from("FOOTAB").where().equals("NAME", "John").end();

>
ORMs are a waste of time.

Absolutely!

The real problem with most ORM tools is that they tend to treat the
database as dumb storage rather than as an intelligent server. 

ORM generated applications often end up doing a lot of unnecessary
work on the client because the SQL that would perform the task on the
server very often is vendor specific.