#AskFedi: please recommend me (open-source) relational databases that are easy to run and *do not* use SQL.
(ORMs are not an acceptable solution, I am looking for something that is designed from the start to not use SQL)
I don't have strong opinions on what it *should* be, to be clear, as long as it's not SQL; I'm interested in seeing what other approaches folks have come up with over the years!
@virtulis Ah yeah, that sounds like my own database project though that is in JS :)
I did run across one other database that does this, recently, but unfortunately it was proprietary.
@joepie91 I am not aware of any *relational* databases that don't use SQL. There are graph databases that one can do equivalent things with, I guess, like Steve Dekorte's VertexDB. And CouchDB is a document database, but it can do some relational-like things too.
@freakazoid I'd be fine with a graph database, as long as it has sufficient performance on relational tasks (comparable to something like PostgreSQL), and offers a similar set of guarantees - thinking of things like referential integrity and 'proper' transactions.
Do either of those meet those goals? The performance doesn't need to be exactly like PostgreSQL (as that has been seeing optimization for a long time) but also not so slow that it's only really useful in an academic setting :p
@joepie91 Almost certainly not. There aren't that many serious database people in the world, so I would actually be surprised if such a thing existed. Having worked in the NoSQL industry at its genesis, I can tell you those folks aren't serious database people. Maybe some have gotten on board since then, but they're also not open source.
PostgreSQL is basically *the* relational database, open source or not, from what I can tell.
@joepie91 If you're looking for an OLAP-type store instead of OLTP, there's Cassandra and Hive, though. And there's Hbase for OLTP, but I think that one is SQL.
@freakazoid Definitely looking for something OLTP, in the vast majority of cases
@joepie91 Actually I guess Cassandra can do OLTP as well. It's just column-oriented instead of row-oriented. But it's meant to be distributed, so it's not nearly as easy to set up as pgsql.
@joepie91 something I worked on even longer ago was an Erlang KV store where the shtick was you could pass it Erlang functions that it'd let modify data in place and log the functions/args themselves (not the changes). And of course you could do reads the same way, "map-reduce" of any complexity you needed.
That project is so dead though it was last online in a Hg repo on Bitbucket, lol. But I still think the concept could have worked.