doltgresql VS usql

PostgreSQL support here

https://github.com/dolthub/doltgresql

Background and architecture discussion here

https://dolthub.com/blog/2023-11-01-announcing-doltgresql/

We're writing a postgres-compatible database that doesn't use any postgres code:

https://github.com/dolthub/doltgresql/

We're doing this because our main product (Dolt) is MySQL-compatible, but a lot of people prefer postgres. Like, they really strongly prefer postgres. When figuring out how to support them, we basically had three options:

1) Foreign data wrapper. This doesn't work well because you can't use non-native stored procedure calls, which are used heavily throughout our product (e.g. CALL DOLT_COMMIT('-m', 'changes'), CALL DOLT_BRANCH('newBranch')). We would have had to invent a new UX surface area for the product just to support Postgres.

2) Fork postgres, write our own storage layer and parser extensions, etc. Definitely doable, but it would mean porting our existing Go codebase to C, and not being able to share code with Dolt as development continues. Or else rewriting Dolt in C, throwing out the last 5 years of work. Or doing something very complicated and difficult to use a golang library from C code.

3) Emulation. Keep Dolt's Go codebase and query engine and build a Postgres layer on top of it to support the syntax, wire protocol, types, functions, etc.

Ultimately we went with the emulation approach as the least bad option, but it's an uphill climb to get to enough postgres support to be worth using. Our main effort right now is getting all of postgres's types working.

Very cool. I wonder when it makes sense to engineer things at this level vs using something like Azure AI search. [0]

Love to see version control on all the things! Wonder if the version control features would be more robust if implemented in Doltgres.

[0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/ai-se...

[1] https://github.com/dolthub/doltgresql

Also all languages has an query-builder / ORM so the benefit of something like PRQL is possibly not big enough to merit it as an additional dependency.

My suggestion:

Make PRQL a cli tool that can be used by allowing users to connect to a database in a similar fashion as something like usql (https://github.com/xo/usql),

take a look at: https://github.com/xo/usql

https://github.com/xo/usql has some good first issues

There's a new release of usql that adds even more autocomplete and fixes a bunch of issues: https://github.com/xo/usql/releases/tag/v0.11.0

I am not a big fan of the complex literate programming style involving code-generation which this article talks about.

But I recently discovered that Google's zx [1] scripting utility supports executing scripts in markdown documents and I combined it with httpie [2] and usql [3] for a bit of quick and dirty automation testing and api verification code and it worked out pretty well.

[1] https://github.com/google/zx#markdown-scripts

[2] https://github.com/httpie/httpie

[3] https://github.com/xo/usql