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Lobsters0 Hot0 comments8 min read
Things I want in a modern relational query language
A long-form essay explores what a modern relational query language could look like if it borrowed ideas from functional programming and modern language design. The author argues SQL's power comes from its declarative, functional-adjacent 4GL nature but that most implementations (especially MySQL) are hostile to that spirit through clumsy syntax, poor error reporting, opaque query planners, weak user-defined types, and lack of sum types or pattern matching. Detailed hypothetical syntax examples show how discriminated unions, pattern matching, and polymorphic foreign keys could simplify schemas like IBM i's stack-frame introspection functions or shared image tables across multiple entity types. Comments add real project references, including a Scheme-based relational demo (coddb) and an in-progress database exposing an LLVM-like IR instead of SQL, called Rad.
Source: https://sporks.space/2026/08/19/things-i-want-in-a-modern-relational-query-language. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
