"SQL is Dead"

Caleb Brown

According to Monty Taylor, of the MySQL based Drizzle project, 'SQL is Dead'.

In a short presentation yesterday at LCA, Monty demonstrated why he thought SQL should take a back seat to more efficient forms of talking to relational databases. If you've ever run a database backed website that has encountered any serious amount of traffic I'm sure you're well aware of how critical the performance of the website is effected by the database. When there's a performance problem in our code it's always a database issue and it's usually fixed with an improved query, some caching or a combination of both.

Monty pointed out that this big shared resource has extra work to do for every client that sends it an SQL query. In addition to executing queries and fetching results, the database also does query parsing and optimizing. Surely this extra processing could be done on the client side.

And if our database is eventually going to parse the SQL query we wrote in our application and convert it into a form it can understand, why not just give it the query in that form and eliminate it's unnecessary processing?

This line of thinking was even more compelling after Monty pointed out that with techniques like ORM we are already removing SQL queries from our applications.

I actually think this is a good idea, but I'd be interested to see the actual difference it'd make to performance. At the very least removing cumbersome SQL could improve the quality and robustness of our applications. If nothing else it would eliminate SQL injection vulnerabilities entirely.