TablaM VS honeysql

> Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off.

I work in this space (small/mid-size).

The good news is that there are several "obvious" ways to pull this off because an ERP is the culmination of everything a company needs and does. So almost anything you can imagine on the software is part of it.

The bad news, and the reason everyone wants a solution, is that is truly a big space, and then you need E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.

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My take is to start from the bottom, and build a much better version of Access/FoxPro (https://tablam.org).

Any medium/big ERP end being a specialized computing platform that needs:

- A programming language

- A database engine

- An orchestration engine

- ELT engine

- Auth

- UI/Report builders

And to be clear: NONE of the "programming language", "database engine", etc are a good fit today.

NONE.

This is the big thing, This is the reason (from a tech POW only) that most attempts fail.

This is the secret of why Cobol rule(d): Is all of this! but is too old! (also, this is why SQL still is best: Is almost this).

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So, to pull this off, you need a team that knows what is "missing" from our current tools, makes a well-integrated package, and adds a "user-friendly" interface in a way that is palatable for the kind of user that uses excel (powerfully).

Is not that impossible. FoxPro was the best example of this kind of integrated solution.

P.D: This is my life's dream, to make this truth!

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: TablaM relational language (https://tablam.org)

TablaM is an in-progress programming language to provide a more ergonomic experience for building data-oriented applications.

This means that where most languages are focused on low-level details or engineering at large, TablaM is tailored with some small & big design decisions to make it enjoyable to write applications for e-commerce, finance, ERPs, and similar.

Cool things:

- TablaM marry the array + relational models. It means we should get very little need for manual loops and all the ops are vectorized.

Yeah, I worked on https://tablam.org and https://spacetimedb.com.

It becomes pretty clear that `order` is a significant property to make useful (and performant!) programs. "Duplicates" is also required to make usefull programs.

One nonobvious reason for this: You wanna report that a `customer` has a duplicated key `1`. If you CAN'T model `[(customer.id = 1), (customer.id = 1)]` then you can't report errors! And `erroneous` data is VITAL to make useful programs because then the only possibility is "perfect" data, and that is not possible!

Another reason is that we want to `count` duplicates, to see `duplicates`, and other NON-obvious at first: "What is a duplicate?". Get fun with floats, Unicode, combining case and non-case sensitive input... and is obvious that for useful programs IS REQUIRED to support bags in an extended version of the relational model.

And yet...

IS very important to remember about `set semantics` and try to adhere to it when makes sense. Your query planner will like it. You "valid" constraints like it. And `unique index` like it. And so on...

Finally, for app development, I will "suggest" everyone use my lang https://tablam.org!

This is moe interesting than it looks, probably because the best part (IMHO) is about the type system, that is what enables the other ideas.

> In Julia, types are first-class and every value has a type

This is what I do from the start in https://tablam.org and only later found that is not common! Is so intuitive this way and simpler to check, by a lot. In fact, I waste so much time adapting type inference algorithms that are hard to translate because for some reason graphs are imposed on trees, types are second-class and live at a distance (and erased) and all is a mess this way.

The relational model already makes this so simple: `project / rename / extend` relational operators cover you.

From this other facilities become possible. Note how in `SQL` you don't have functions as first-class per se, but now try to imagine that a function is a table and suddenly, is much better!

My relational lang (https://tablam.org) that I wish to be a Excel + Access replacement is still half-backed.

I move it slowly in my personal computer but not much in public. Maybe adding another person will help me on that!

> what is a good alternative to Access (or Fox, I add)

Nothing.

Access is(was) in fact a worse alternative to Fox:

- Much worse DB engine, and that is saying a lot (FoxPro db can and get corrupted. A typical functionality that was added to any fox codebase was a utility to fix it)

- MUCH MUCH worse programming language (VB) that is neither good as-is, much less as a data-programing language.

Fox/dbase is the only data-oriented language that was relatively popular and fit for the use-case.

This is by a mile the main point: Is a desert looking for languages that are made for business app/data oriented programing (and much harder looking for something not weird).

The main options: Fox/dBase/Informix(? not remember), kdb+, Cobol, SQL(when extended as store procedure lang with loops and that)

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This point is big. Having a good form builder (that is already rare) is not enough to be a real contender for this space. You need a language where making queries is truly nice.

In short, you need a language that is `LINQ/Relational` as first-class end-to-end.

- If this lang needs an ORM: FAIL.

- If this lang needs to compose strings to make a query: FAIL.

- If exist "impedance mismatch" between data manipulation/queries and the rest of the lang: FAIL.

- It should also support super-advanced types like date, decimal, currency and ideally dimensional units. Ideally algebraic types as today.

- It should have a version of Rust `serve, Into/From` for easy conversion between data + formats.

- It should look "normal" like python/swift with `LINQ` queries.

This is the lang I trying to build: https://tablam.org

> I asked was about querying data without ever using a SQL language, like tapping directly into the data.

I agree (making https://tablam.org to try a fix & working on https://github.com/clockworklabs/SpacetimeDB in the SQL conformance).

Before I think SQL was bad. *Now I'm certain*. SQL is absurdly massive for things that could have collapse all the features 10x or more.

However, working in an RDBM now I also understand why is not desirable to make "raw" calls to the DB: The engine MUST mediate all the calls to make things works (from query optimization, execution, iteration, lock management, transaction management, etc).

Is incredible how much sophistication is in a simple `SELECT * FROM table`.

What I wish is to build a `Wasm-like` IR so that is what anybody target, and `SQL` is not the mediator.

In my case each lang I have learned (+12) I start coding a mini-ORM. I have done the same so many times, and that is a good way to learn from me. Also, I have to learn Rust building https://tablam.org.

It sounds puzzling, I start learning Rust with https://tablam.org and probably was making my life harder trying to do "advanced" stuff when not have any idea of what I was doing.

I recall using korma way back I and I don’t recall it being terrible but I would say https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql has very much superseded it by this point… (but I can see how that might not be obviously clear if one is to look at superficial metrics like GitHub stars for example…)

Joins can certainly work in a data format like YAML. For an example, see Honey SQL from the Clojure community [0] (though without something to contrast strings like Clojure's keywords, you miss out on the automatic parameterization).

You mentioned moving JOINs around, so I'll mention that if represented as structured data, you can move any of the top level components around, so you could more closely follow the "true order of SQL" [1]. For example, I would love to be able to put FROM before SELECT in all or almost all cases. There's also being able to share and add to something like a complicated WHERE clause, where essentially all programming languages have built-in facilities for robustly manipulating ordered and associative data compared to string manipulation, which is not well-suited for the task.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't particularly care for YAML (though it doesn't bother me that much), but as someone who's done their fair share of programmatic SQL creation and manipulation in strings, not having a native way to represent SQL as data is a mistake in my opinion.

0: https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql#big-complicated-exa...

In Clojure-land, we are also using HoneySQL [1] which has similar characteristics. You are still working within SQL semantics so it's a bit more complicated, but we are doing great complicated things with just maps, no API necessary.

[1] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

using honeysql we can make structured queries as well

As someone else already pointed out, next.jdbc is good for database connectivity (for Postgres and beyond). For composing the queries themselves, I strongly recommend Honey SQL. It lets you represent queries themselves as normal Clojure data structures, just vectors and maps.

Perhaps you're looking for a way of arranging SQL as an AST represented by data structures (or objects) that can be fed to a compiler. HoneySQL[0] is one such implementation of this idea and it makes your general transformation trivial for Clojure programs. You don't need to mess around with string concatenation because you have a predictable and extensible compiler for data structures (which are themselves easily composable/transformable/storable with Clojure) that you can trust to do the right thing. If you're using some weird database or need an esoteric syntax, extending the compiler to your clause is easy to do[1].

[0] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

[1] https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql#extensibility

https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql (write SQL without having to write SQL)

I've used it from Clojure, via HoneySQL, so no ORM, no danger of SQL injection. It was really wonderful!

https://github.com/seancorfield/honeysql

I used it to quickly iterate on the development of migration SQL scripts for a MySQL DB, which was running in production on RDS.

I might have switched to H2 DB later, because that was more compatible with MariaDB, but I could use the same Clojure code, representing the SQL queries, because HoneySQL can emit different syntaxes.