[sschnei8]

What is the human need to bash SQL at all costs? At its core, such a simple syntax, yet its so powerful at aggregating/manipulating tabular data and the like. Instead we’d rather declaratively say what we want in a more verbose/disjointed way… fascinating

[nonethewiser]

I'm with you. The more SQL alternatives I've seen, the more I'm convinced that SQL doesn't have that much fat or disfunction in it's syntax. There is inherent complexity. Follow an SQL-killer's guide far enough and you will see them quietly reintroduce the very same abstractions SQL solved decades ago.

[CodesInChaos]

For me SQL feels like PHP. Sure it's usable, but it doesn't spark joy.

Syntactically PRQL is much simpler, cleaner and more flexible. You simply chain pipeline stages instead of having a single monolithic query statement.

Data model wise EdgeQL is close to what I want (links instead of joins, optionality instead of null, nesting support), but it's syntax is almost as bad as SQL.

[unshavedyak]

Oh man, PRQL looks so good.

I just wish they had mutation in there too. I don't like the idea of swapping between PRQL and SQL, let alone some complex update statements where i'd rather write the query in PRQL. .. Yea you could argue they shouldn't be that complex for updates though heh.

[reverseindex]

I used to use SQL very extensively, but then I moved into different roles, and now I always have to look up its syntax, stuff like "how did HAVING work again?", "how do I search for a date two days before today". With Text-to-SQL I can express my query in natural language. Because I have a very solid understanding of relational data models I can craft my prompt very precisely, but without constantly having to go back to the documentation. So at least for casual users it's very helpful.

[dvdkon]

I'll give one reason of many: Its fixed pipeline model doesn't match how humans think about data transformation.

[johtso]

When you're having to work with someone else's godawful convoluted database schema you're sometimes really happy not to have to write the query yourself. Giving the LLM context with previously written queries can be quite effective.

The writing SQL experience is a product of both SQL's syntax, the structure of the database you're querying over and the complexity of your query.

When things get hairy, and you have a good number of representative queries already written that you can use as context, LLMs can be really nice tool.

[sschnei8]

Agreed, but maybe the step change there is refactoring the data model, not continuing to author “hairy” sql via LLM that’s all fine until it breaks… and you end having to mend the nastiness back into compliance the ol’ fashion way