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From: ajayshah@aludra.usc.edu (Ajay Shah)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: A few "fundamental" questions concerning SQL
Message-ID: <10632@chaph.usc.edu>
Date: 6 Jul 90 04:37:14 GMT
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Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
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At the outset, let me say i'm a total novice to databases; i've
just done a little work with databases and was curious.  So here
goes:

      I've tried writing SQL queries and found it to be
      tremendously irritating, mainly because it's nonprocedural.
      Now i'm sure 99% of the programmers of the world prefer
      thinking procedural programming languages over
      nonprocedural ones.  I'm also a sufficiently fluent HLL
      programmer to be certain it's more painful generating SQL
      that it would be generating a procedural query language.
      I'm also nearly certain optimising the speed of query would
      be easier with a procedural query language.

      So why is SQL defined the way it is?

      Is it supposed to be some kind of standard which imposes
      restrictions on the internal organisation of a RDBMS, so
      that no "real-life" queries would use SQL?  Or is it just a
      rotten way of writing queries which somehow happened to
      become a standard?

      Are there any prominent standards for procedural queries on
      relational databases?  Is SQL a portable standard: i.e.,
      can one expect to be able to blindly take a SQL script
      written with one RDB (say, Unify) and make it work with
      another (say, Oracle).  If so, then does that not reduce
      the major RDB alternatives (Unify, Ingress, Oracle, etc) to
      pretty generic alternatives (they all become SQL engines)?
      In that case, what is it that differentiates two vendors?

      I'd use Unix facilities for file-handling and backups etc,
      anyway, so *if* SQL is totally portable and a 100% standard
      then I wouldn't care about which RDB I used.

      I believe IBM has a major database called DB2.  What is it
      like?  I'm mostly used to old versions of Unify (3.1 and
      3.2) and have pretty much been out of touch with databases
      since.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Ajay Shah, (213)747-9991, ajayshah@usc.edu
                              The more things change, the more they stay insane.
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