At the risk of getting run off this site... Jira's search query widget, which allows in some sense nearly arbitrary SQL while providing syntax completion, making sure you don't run off the rails with actual arbitrary SQL, and supporting very deeply nested conditionals correctly is probably one of the most impressive things to me about that system. I just wish it was not such a staggeringly large pile of work to get to such a thing in other systems. Even if someone cites some sort of open source library that supports this, simply defining to that library what columns and operations you support would be a lengthy task of specification, refinement, and testing.
It'd be neat if you could let more users just have SQL but there's so many ways for that to go terribly wrong nowadays, with all those nice juicy SQL features that so many engines now support.
I've been using and frustrated by Jira for a long time, so I'd love to be pointed in the right direction if I'm wrong here, but JQL only lets you write severely limited "where" clauses that plug into something that probably isn't SQL at all.
You cannot use JQL to pull up anything but a list of issues. You cannot aggregate fields within those issues. Many fields aren't even an option. The built-in functions are garbage. Some are redundant. Some are named similarly but do wildly different things. You can't even use subqueries or regex. Is there documentation disproving me somewhere that I'm not aware of?
These are all huge problems with endless unresolved tickets on Atlassian's support pages that point out very good and very common use cases that people have desperately wanted for over a decade. The answer is always yet another plugin. Security and data integrity can't be the reason Jira search sucks since many of those plugins are buggy and have more access to the backend.
As far as I can tell "JQL" was a name devised by their marketing department to make it seem more powerful than it really is and otherwise prop up a nasty plugin ecosystem that nobody wants. I sometimes feel like my outlook inbox rules are more sophisticated and that's pretty sad.
Something I have been considering is a ETL pipeline that, for each customer in our system, writes only their data to a SQLite file. Then, just expose a full SQLite query facility on that file.
This only works when your customers are of a reasonable size (e.g. small businesses or individuals) but could provide arbitrary analytics power.
It's also a safe target for AIs to write sql against, if you're into that sort of thing.
I didn't know JIRA can assist you with writing JQL, looks like I'm lost in the UI hell. I always just click Advanced and then click what I want together. Although I only need this kind of functionality very rarely, to make up for other UI grievances, so w/e.
JQL is a very powerful tool. No one sets up Jira perfectly. Not at first. People use anything like a label: the epic, the release version. etc. And JQL let's you get around that in the short term and find stuff.
> v3 couldn't do this. No OR support. No complex boolean expressions. No parentheses for precedence.
This wasn't a minor limitation; it was a fundamental capability gap. Users were forced to learn ClickHouse SQL, write raw queries, and maintain them as our schemas evolved. We'd built a query builder that couldn't handle real-world queries.
This article is part of our launch week and our main distribution channel is LinkedIn.
Our articles are now being read by stakeholders beyond our ICP.
I agree that LinkedIn/ChatGPT style isn't the best route. We cringe on it too. We are experimenting to find a middle ground between what gets more reach, while not giving into the trending writing styles.
Can I please get some more feedback from you?
- would you prefer more technical details in this article?
- or just a change in the sentence structure that is more natural (like this response)?
- or both?
I still struggle with ORMs. SQL is... declarative. If you're working with multiple RDBMSs, sure? Maybe I want my local dev to be sqlite and scaled be postgres? I've never run into that in production. A DSL on top of a DSL doesn't make a lot of sense.
Hand-rolling SQL inside another programming language comes with some unpleasantness, like protecting against SQL injection and making sure the SQL is valid, especially when hand-constructing the query based on input parameters: “sort ascending? Descending? Filter all but things in this group? etc.”
Parameter management in some languages are unpleasant, like how JDBC only has positional arguments; and any time you do string concat in a language, you start getting in danger of misformed SQL.
Ultra basic ORMs, like Exposed (Kotlin), are well-tested frameworks that do exactly what I want. Want a single value in the =? Or want it to be an “in”? Or what if it’s null? Handled. No special string management. Want parameters? Handled.
When I see pure ORM’d code, I can feel safe expecting it to be protected from injection and formatting issues. It’s reduced cognitive load and greater safety.
When I see raw string SQL management, I have to put another layer of care and attention to try and make sure (and maybe still fail) there’s no application-crashing mistakes in that part of code.
It’s kinda like working with typed and compiled code. Greater protection from error.
How do you do conditional filters in pure SQL from a backend Java / Python app, without doing string concatenation?
Not a fan of all the proxy object circus ORMs do but I'd leave row-> domain object mapping and filter building to some library. Sweet spot is probably something akin to Android Room / Micronaut Data JDBC.
My main issue with ORMs is they always end up being just another thing to learn, adding needless complexity. They are not an alternative to SQL as you always end up having to understand what kind of SQL they create and how it works for either performance or complex queries.
I just want to write one language at a time if I can. I like sql when querying directly, almost as a UI of sorts, but it’s not my favorite when I am just trying to get my code to work, and the database is a relatively minor detail.
Can’t relate this comment to the article. They can’t just run user sql on DB because they are changing internal db schema between releases. And they can’t implement real sql because it is massive compared to some simple query dsl
SQL is just extremely bad on top of being poorly integrated with the host language. Middle-endian order, terrible abstraction capabilities, no test support to speak of, essentially no project management tooling...
I use ORMs so that I can write the thing I want to do in a vaguely reasonable language, just like I manipulate XML datastructures in code instead of writing XSLT.
This is a chronic problem in software. What I do instead is either omit the complexity or make it as visible as everything else. If it's not worth making it discoverable, it's not worth having. If you omit it, you get customer feedback about its importance instead of them struggling in silence.
One of my guiding principles is "avoid indirection unless you add abstraction." If what you're doing is a query language, then keeping that transparent and using existing languages is a good idea, unless you can motivate a new language with a new mental model. E.g. it might be better to write an SQL query validator than a DSL.
I hate getting that 'is this LLM output?' feeling halfway through so many articles these days. The article is good but sentences like "This wasn't a minor limitation; it was a fundamental capability gap." are painful to read.
> Currently, logs and traces live in separate worlds. You can see that a trace has an error, and you can see related logs, but you can't query them together.
I've looked into SigNoz a few times but still using Grafana. The former does look promising, and features like this would start to make the case for maybe switching.
SoQL's lack of joins and subqueries makes it a real pain in my life. `having` and `group by` are not enough when doing a lot of things - like confirming data migration of 40m objects.
Can't do a query builder in one step, or must write Apex.
jerf|5 months ago
It'd be neat if you could let more users just have SQL but there's so many ways for that to go terribly wrong nowadays, with all those nice juicy SQL features that so many engines now support.
sublinear|5 months ago
You cannot use JQL to pull up anything but a list of issues. You cannot aggregate fields within those issues. Many fields aren't even an option. The built-in functions are garbage. Some are redundant. Some are named similarly but do wildly different things. You can't even use subqueries or regex. Is there documentation disproving me somewhere that I'm not aware of?
These are all huge problems with endless unresolved tickets on Atlassian's support pages that point out very good and very common use cases that people have desperately wanted for over a decade. The answer is always yet another plugin. Security and data integrity can't be the reason Jira search sucks since many of those plugins are buggy and have more access to the backend.
As far as I can tell "JQL" was a name devised by their marketing department to make it seem more powerful than it really is and otherwise prop up a nasty plugin ecosystem that nobody wants. I sometimes feel like my outlook inbox rules are more sophisticated and that's pretty sad.
crabmusket|5 months ago
This only works when your customers are of a reasonable size (e.g. small businesses or individuals) but could provide arbitrary analytics power.
It's also a safe target for AIs to write sql against, if you're into that sort of thing.
perching_aix|5 months ago
giveita|5 months ago
giveita|5 months ago
This wasn't a minor limitation; it was a fundamental capability gap. Users were forced to learn ClickHouse SQL, write raw queries, and maintain them as our schemas evolved. We'd built a query builder that couldn't handle real-world queries.
What is it with the LinkedIn style?
No X
No Y
No Z
Isn't A its B
outlier99|5 months ago
ak_builds|5 months ago
Our articles are now being read by stakeholders beyond our ICP.
I agree that LinkedIn/ChatGPT style isn't the best route. We cringe on it too. We are experimenting to find a middle ground between what gets more reach, while not giving into the trending writing styles.
Can I please get some more feedback from you?
- would you prefer more technical details in this article? - or just a change in the sentence structure that is more natural (like this response)? - or both?
ryoshu|5 months ago
t-writescode|5 months ago
Parameter management in some languages are unpleasant, like how JDBC only has positional arguments; and any time you do string concat in a language, you start getting in danger of misformed SQL.
Ultra basic ORMs, like Exposed (Kotlin), are well-tested frameworks that do exactly what I want. Want a single value in the =? Or want it to be an “in”? Or what if it’s null? Handled. No special string management. Want parameters? Handled.
When I see pure ORM’d code, I can feel safe expecting it to be protected from injection and formatting issues. It’s reduced cognitive load and greater safety.
When I see raw string SQL management, I have to put another layer of care and attention to try and make sure (and maybe still fail) there’s no application-crashing mistakes in that part of code.
It’s kinda like working with typed and compiled code. Greater protection from error.
never_inline|5 months ago
Not a fan of all the proxy object circus ORMs do but I'd leave row-> domain object mapping and filter building to some library. Sweet spot is probably something akin to Android Room / Micronaut Data JDBC.
chillfox|5 months ago
dec0dedab0de|5 months ago
ozgrakkurt|5 months ago
lmm|5 months ago
I use ORMs so that I can write the thing I want to do in a vaguely reasonable language, just like I manipulate XML datastructures in code instead of writing XSLT.
est|5 months ago
yes! please stop making webpages background dark. It's a terrible design for ppl with astigmatism like me...
ak_builds|5 months ago
We are revamping the design. I'll ensure I understand more about this and make it more accessible.
Devs seem to prefer dark theme across the brand (eg Supabase, Linear). Hence, the current choice.
aitchnyu|5 months ago
foxglacier|5 months ago
This is a chronic problem in software. What I do instead is either omit the complexity or make it as visible as everything else. If it's not worth making it discoverable, it's not worth having. If you omit it, you get customer feedback about its importance instead of them struggling in silence.
flowerthoughts|5 months ago
gm678|5 months ago
> Currently, logs and traces live in separate worlds. You can see that a trace has an error, and you can see related logs, but you can't query them together.
I've looked into SigNoz a few times but still using Grafana. The former does look promising, and features like this would start to make the case for maybe switching.
ankitnayan|5 months ago
prpl|5 months ago
I think “SQL is the interface” even for telemtry is the thing that truly makes sense, but it is messy with logs compared to splunk for example
shakna|5 months ago
Can't do a query builder in one step, or must write Apex.
monkeyelite|5 months ago
ameliaquining|5 months ago
Seems to be 3978 lines of Go at present.