On 1 April 2010 09:13, Dave Page <dp...@postgresql.org> wrote: > Following a great deal of discussion, I'm pleased to announce that the > PostgreSQL Core team has decided that the major theme for the 9.1 > release, due in 2011, will be 'NoSQL'. > > There is a growing trend towards NoSQL databases, with major sites > like Twitter and Facebook utilising them extensively. NoSQL databases > often include multi-master replication, clustering and failover > features that have long been requested in PostgresSQL, but have been > extremely difficult to implement with SQL which has prevented us from > advancing Postgree in the way that we'd like. > > To address this, the intention is to remove SQL support from > Postgres, and replace it with a language called 'QUEL'. This will > provide us with the flexibility we need to implement the features of > modern NoSQL databases. With no SQL support there will obviously be > some differences in the query syntax that must be used to access your > data. For example, the query: > > select (e.salary/ (e.age - 18)) as comp from employee as e where > e.name = "Jones" > > would be rewritten as: > > range of e is employee retrieve (comp = e.salary/ (e.age - 18)) where > e.name = "Jones" > > Aggregate syntax in QUEL is particularly powerful. For example, the query: > > select dept, > avg(salary) as avg_salary, > sum(salary) as tot_salary > from > employees > group by > dept > > may be written as: > > range of e is employee > retrieve (e.dept, > avg_salary = avg(e.salary by e.dept), > tot_salary = sum(e.salary by e.dept) > ) > > Note that the grouped column can be specified for each individual > aggregate. > > We will be producing a comprehensive guide to the QUEL syntax to aid > with application migration. We appreciate the difficulty that this > change may cause some users, but feel we must embrace the NoSQL > philosophy in order to remain "The world's most advanced Open Source > database" > > "There's no question that, at 21 years old, the SQL standard is past its > prime," said core developer and standards expert Peter Eisentraut. "It's > time for us to switch to something fresher. I personally would have > preferred XSLT, but QUEL is almost as good." > > Project committer Heikki Linnakangas added: "By replacing SQL with > QUEL not only will will be able to add new features to Postgres that > were previously too difficult, but we'll also increase user loyalty as > it'll > be much harder for them to change to a different, SQL-based > database. That'll be pretty cool." > > You may also notice that without SQL, the project name is somewhat > misleading. To address that, the project name will be changed to > 'PostgreQUEL' with the 9.1 release. We expect this will also put an > end to the periodic debates on changing the project name. > > Dave Page > On behalf of the PostgreSQL Core Team > > I prefer to dump all my data in a big text file and grep it for the information I need.
Thom
