[HN Gopher] 50 Years of Queries
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50 Years of Queries
Author : rbanffy
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-10-07 10:08 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cacm.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cacm.acm.org)
| abetaha wrote:
| A very enjoyable read of the history of databases through the
| lens of query language evolution, and the research done at IBM
| and Berkeley for System R and Ingres.
| refset wrote:
| Good overview, although a rather important aspect of the
| 'resilience' that's not really covered here is the way that SQL
| technologies navigate and sustain performance trends. Relational
| databases are sticky in large part because the implementations
| are always getting faster and more sophisticated.
|
| SQL being a declarative language means that applications built on
| top of it can relatively easily take advantage of new hardware
| and increasing parallelization without changing any code (in
| addition to all manner of new software tricks,
| compression/optimization/joins/etc).
| qianli_cs wrote:
| Great summary! I also recommend the "What Goes Around Comes
| Around" paper written by Mike Stonebraker and Joe Hellerstein:
| https://people.cs.umass.edu/~yanlei/courses/CS691LL-f06/pape...
|
| It was written 20 years ago, but even today, the relational model
| and SQL are still the prevailing choices.
| jhd3 wrote:
| And there is also the sequel by Michael Stonebraker and Andrew
| Pavlo - https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2024/whatgoesaround-
| sigmodrec20...
| smartmic wrote:
| ... also commented here on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846883
| qianli_cs wrote:
| Yeah, the sequel is a great read as well!
| pncnmnp wrote:
| Donald Chamberlin's (the author of this article) oral history is
| also quite fun -
| https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20....
| A lot of the history discussed in the article is expanded upon
| there, and vice versa.
|
| He talks about how System R got its name:
|
| > Two of the important figures of System R were Leonard Liu, who
| was the person who hired me into IBM, and Frank King, who was the
| manager of the Relational Database project. ... One of the things
| that Frank thought was important was for our project to have a
| name so that we could make slides about it, write papers about
| it, and get some recognition. In order to get recognition for
| something it's good for it to have a name. So Frank called a
| meeting and said, "You guys are going to have to think of a name
| for your project." We thought, "Well, that's a waste of time.
| Don't bother us." But he persisted and said, "You guys are going
| to have to come up with a name." So for lack of anything else we
| said, "Well, we'll call ourselves System R." R stood for
| relations, or maybe it stood for research, or Franco Putzolu even
| thought it stood for Rufus, which was the name of his dog. It was
| a little bit of artful ambiguity what the R stood for, but that
| was the name of our project.
|
| Also his earliest interaction with Larry Ellison:
|
| > I'd been seeing some things in the trade press once in a while
| about a company called Software Development Laboratories that
| claimed to be developing a relational database system. I hadn't
| paid much attention to it, but in the summer of 1978, I got a
| phone call. It was from a guy named Larry Ellison, and he said he
| was the president of Software Development Laboratories, and they
| were developing an implementation of the SQL language. Since we
| were in the research division of IBM, our philosophy of research
| was to publish our results in the open literature. As you know,
| many papers 22 came out of the System R project that were
| published in conferences and journals, describing the language
| and the internal interfaces of the system and some of the
| optimization technology and so on. The project was not a secret
| and, in fact, we'd been telling everybody about it that would
| listen. And one of the people that had listened and had read some
| of our papers was Larry. So he called me up and said that he was
| interested in implementing the SQL language in the UNIX
| environment. IBM wasn't interested in UNIX at all. We were
| primarily a mainframe company at that time. We had some
| minicomputer products, but they really weren't robust enough to
| manage a relational database, and there was little, if any,
| attention being paid to the UNIX platform. But Larry was really
| interested in the UNIX platform. He had a PDP-11, I think, that
| he was using as the basis for his SQL implementation, and he
| wanted to exchange visits with us and learn whatever he could
| about what we were doing, and in particular, he wanted to make
| sure that his implementation was consistent with ours so that
| there would be a common interface with compatible error codes and
| everything else. I was very pleased to get this call. I thought,
| "Terrific. This is somebody in the world who is interested in our
| work." But I had some constraints on what I could do because of
| my position in IBM. I had to get management approval to talk to
| somebody on the outside, even though there was nothing secret
| about our project. Everything that Larry had access to was
| perfectly available in the open literature. So I went to talk to
| my boss, Frank King, and Frank talked to some lawyers--there were
| always plenty of lawyers in IBM that could think of a reason not
| to do most anything. Sure enough, they said, "You better not talk
| to other companies who are building products that are competitive
| with ours. We really don't want you exchanging visits with these
| guys, so just tell them 'Thanks for your interest, and have a
| nice day.'" So that's what I did. I told Larry that,
| unfortunately, due to the constraints of the company, we wouldn't
| be able to exchange information other than in the public
| literature. But that didn't slow down Software Development
| Laboratories. They released their implementation of SQL. In fact,
| it was the first commercial implementation of SQL to go on the
| market. It was delivered by Larry Ellison's company, initially
| called Software Development Laboratories, which later changed its
| name, I think, to Relational Software Incorporated, and later
| took on the name of the product, which was called Oracle. As you
| know, if you drive along Highway 101 in Redwood City and look at
| the giant 100-foot-tall disk drives over there on the edge of the
| bay, Larry's had some success with these ideas. And rightly so.
| He brought a lot of energy and marketing expertise and a
| completely independent implementation, and was very successful
| with it, and had a major impact on the industry.
| j-pb wrote:
| Reading this gave me a weird idea. What if SQL is so successful
| exactly because its syntax makes JOIN operations cumbersome.
| Other languages where joins are syntactically convenient (e.g.
| datalog) make it much easier to write slow queries, whereas SQL
| forces you to denormalise tables tables from a syntactical
| standpoint already, which later translates to performance gains
| when it comes to semantics.
|
| In a sense SQL is the (typewriter) QWERTY of query languages.
| Inconvenient by design.
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