Against SQL (2021)
49 comments
·October 25, 2025layer8
andai
The way I've heard this phrased is, for potential customers to justify switching to your solution, it can't be 10% better, it needs to be 10x better.
(And on top of that they need to clearly perceive the value of Strange New Thing, and clearly perceive the relative lack of value of the thing they have been emotionally invested in for decades...)
gavinray
> This is compounded by the standardized SQL-centric database driver APIs like ODBC and JDBC.
Newer platforms like Arrow ADBC/FlightSQL are better-suited to high-volume, OLAP style data queries we're seeing become commonplace today but the ecosystem and adoption haven't caught up.
sema4hacker
For any language as large and complicated as SQL, it's easy to come up with a long list of design problems. The difficulty is designing something better, and then even more difficult than that is getting people to use it.
mitchbob
Discussion in 2021 (346 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27791539
dang
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Against SQL (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43777515 - April 2025 (1 comment)
Against SQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40454627 - May 2024 (1 comment)
Against SQL (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777515 - March 2024 (1 comment)
Against SQL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27791539 - July 2021 (339 comments)
YZF
In my day job the question of SQL and its role keeps coming up. Some people want to propagate SQL all the way to clients like web browsers. Perhaps operating over some virtual/abstract data and not the real physical underlying data (that's a whole other layer of complexity). This seems like a bad idea/API in general.
I'm not too familiar with GraphQL but on the surface it seems like another bad idea. Shouldn't you always have some proper API abstraction between your components? My sense for this has been like GraphQL was invented out of the frustration of the frontend team needing to rely on backend teams for adding/changing APIs. But the answer can't be have no APIs?
All that said there might be some situations where your goal is to query raw/tabular data from the client. If that's your application then APIs that enable that can make sense. But most applications are not that.
EDIT: FWIW I do think SQL is pretty good at the job it is designed to do. Trying to replace it seems hard and with unclear value.
lelanthran
> All that said there might be some situations where your goal is to query raw/tabular data from the client. If that's your application then APIs that enable that can make sense. But most applications are not that.
IME, the majority of responses sent to the client is tabular data hammered into a JSON tree.
If you generalise all your response to tabular data, that lets you return scalar values (a table of exactly one row and one column), arrays (a table of exactly one row with multiple columns) or actual tables (a table of multiple rows with multiple columns).
The problem comes in when some of the values within those cells are trees themselves, but I suspect that can be solved by having a response contain multiple tables, with pointer-chasing on the client side reconstructing the trees within cells using the other tables in the response.
That would still leave the 1% of responses that actually are trees, though.
gavinray
> My sense for this has been like GraphQL was invented out of the frustration of the frontend team needing to rely on backend teams for adding/changing APIs.
It's no different ideologically from gRPC, OpenAPI, or OData -- except for the ability to select subsets of fields, which not all of those provide.
Just a type-documented API that the server allows clients to introspect and ask for a listing of operations + schema types.
GQL resolvers are the same code that you'd find behind endpoint handlers for REST "POST /users/1", etc
chao-
Instead of a client dealing with a server that only presents unopinionated, overly-broad CRUD endpoints for core entities/resources, GraphQL is a tool through which the client tricks the server into creating a bespoke viewmodel for it.
YZF
But those endpoints are abstractions. Don't we want control over the surface of the API and our abstractions? If you let the client tell the server what the abstractions are in run-time you've just lost control over that interface?
As I was saying, there might be some situations where that's the right thing, but in general it seems you want to have a well controlled layer there the specifies the contract between these pieces.
chao-
My post was only intended as a commentary regarding how I approach GraphQL after a few forays into it (current stance: would not default to GraphQL, but not against it either).
I was not intending to dodge your questions, but nor was I trying to comprehensively answer them, because they felt a bit unclear. I will make an attempt, combining snippets within your two posts that seem to be related:
>Shouldn't you always have some proper API abstraction between your components?
>But those endpoints are abstractions. Don't we want control over the surface of the API and our abstractions?
I can't answer this unless I know what concepts/layers you are referring to when you say "abstraction between components". If you mean "between the client and server", then yes, and GraphQL does this by way of the schema, types, and resolvers that the server supports, along with the query language itself. The execution is still occurring on the server, and the server still chooses what to implement and support.
If by "abstraction between components" you mean "URL endpoints and HTTP methods" then no, GraphQL chose to not have the abstraction be defined by the URL endpoint. If you use GraphQL, you do so having accepted that the decision point where resources are named is not at the URL or routing level. That doesn't make it not an abstraction, or not "proper" in some way.
>But the answer can't be have no APIs?
I don't understand what you mean by "No APIs"? You also mention "control over the surface"...
Is your concern that, because the client can ask the server "Please only respond with this subset of nodes, edges and properties: _______", the server has "no API"? Or it doesn't have "control"? I assure you that you can implement a server with whatever controls you desire. That doesn't mean it will always be easy, or be organized the way you are used to, or have the same performance profile you are used to, but the server can still implement whatever behavior it wants.
>...in general it seems you want to have a well controlled layer there the specifies the contract between these pieces.
I think this wording brings me closer to understanding your main concern.
First, let me repeat: I am not a big GraphQL fan, and am only explaining my understanding after implementing it on both clients and servers. I am not attempting to convince you this is good, only to explain a GraphQL approach to these matters.
The "well-controlled layer" is the edge between nodes, implemented as resolvers. This was the "aha" moment for me in implementing GraphQL the first time: edges are a first-class concept, not just the nodes/entities. If you try using GraphQL in a small project whose domain model has lots of "ifs" and "buts", you will be forced to reach for that layer of control, and get a sense of it. It is simply located in a different place than you are used to.
This "edges are first-class concepts" has an analogue in proper hypermedia REST APIs, but most organizations don't implement REST that way, so except for the five people who fully implement true HATEOAS, it is mostly beside the point.
tomnipotent
GraphQL still has schema constraints, the surface of the API you mentioned.
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nesarkvechnep
I hold a very unpopular opinion of GraphQL. I think it’s a great internal querying API. Every web backend project I’ve worked on tries to implement an API for querying data and it’s usually either fast and inflexible or flexible but slow. GraphQL allows to strike a balance, flexible and reasonably fast, with ways to optimise further.
RedShift1
I love GraphQL, it's great. It takes away the ambiguous way to organize REST APIs (don't we all love the endless discussion about which HTTP status code to use...), and at the top level separates operations into query/mutation/subscription instead of trying to segment everything into HTTP keywords. It takes a bunch of decision layers away and that means faster development.
nevertoolate
Question is: do you need that flexibility if you have the backend for frontend? Can you design such a flexible api which makes it possible to iterate faster? If not, you just pay, in the best case, a constant overhead, or worst case, exponential overhead for each request! If you need to spend time optimizing because you have monitoring for slow queries or downtime caused by never terminating queries than most likely you’ve already eaten implementation speed advantage - if it exists at all in the first place.
tomnipotent
I always thought it was about developer velocity, in this particular case front-end. With a traditional REST API the front-end team needed to coordinate with the back-end team on specific UX features to determine what needed to be done, which was further exasperated when API's needed to be specialized for iPhone vs. Android vs. Web UI.
GraphQL was supposed to help front-end and back-end meet in the middle by letting front-end write specific queries to satisfy specific UX while back-end could still constrain and optimize performance. Front-end could do their work without having to coordinate with back-end, and back-end could focus on more important things than adding fields to some JSON output.
I think it's important to keep this context in mind to appreciate what problem GraphQL is solving.
nawgz
Re: GQL - Explain to me what abstraction layer should exist between the data model and what data is loaded into the client? I’ve never understood why injecting arbitrary complexity on top of the data model is wise.
Perhaps unfettered write access has its problems, and GQL has permissions that handle this issue plenty gracefully, but I don’t see why your data model should be obfuscated from your clients which rely on that data.
tqi
Most of these arguments against seem like personal preferences? For example, I understand it would be convenient to give special treatment to foreign key joins, but i personally find `fk_join(foo, 'bar_id', bar, 'quux_id', quux)` less easy to understand on it's own, without having to look up the underlying table structures to know which tables have which (ie is quux_id a column in foo or bar?). Not to mention I've never worked anywhere where foreign keys were consistently used, mostly for perf reasons.
andai
Take a drink every time you see a comment that didn't even open the article ;)
blef
Feels old when you see how it played out to become SQL for everything in the data ecosystem lately.
Even though SQL as flaws, maybe a lot, it has one upside which is: it's so easy to onboard people on it, in the data ecosystem (warehousing etc.) it means that we can do way much stuff faster than before and hire less technical people, which is great
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zkmon
So I guess the author is trying to help a decision maker to make a decision when faced with a question of whether to use SQL or not. But in reality that question would be settled by other factors and contextual reasons rather than the arguments provided by the author.
For instance, analytics usecases favor SQL stores, as slicing and dicing is better done with row or column stores instead of document databases.
Also, Postgres is getting more popular for lot of usecases, so SQL is here to stay.
gavinray
I work at (what was previously known as) Hasura.
Specifically: the connector bits that deal w/ translating Relational Algebra IR expressed as GraphQL nodes -> SQL engine-specific code.
The author's comments about lack of standardization and portability might not get across just how nightmarishly different SQL dialects are.
I might put together a list of some of the batshit-insane bugs we've run into, even between version upgrades of the same engine.
I really think folks would raise an eyebrow if they understood just how much variance exists between implementations in what might be considered "common" functionality, and the sorts of contortions you have to do to get proper shims/polyfills/emulations.
thom
SQL is one of those wonderful technologies that technologists hate but generates such incomparable value that there's a steady supply of these blog posts, like fumes from the vast ocean of their constantly boiling piss.
throwaway894345
SQL itself doesn't generate any value, relational databases generate value. SQL is just a frontend for them. Anyway, your snark could be applied to _literally any change_. Are you angry that cars are replacing horses? "Horses generate such incomparable value that there's a steady supply of pro-car posts, like fumes from the vast ocean of their constantly boiling piss". Don't like the cotton gin? "Slave labor generates such incomparable value...". There's not really anything of substance in this kind of comment.
thom
If, after 100 years of cars being available, everybody still rode horses and always got where they're going on time, and car people constantly blogged about it, this would be a great analogy.
3eb7988a1663
I don't have a choice to use SQL. If I want to speak to a database, there is precisely one language available. Like Javascript on the web for so long.
qaq
Thing is it's good enough and extremely widely used. Given that there is close to 0 chance an alternative will take off.
lelanthran
> Thing is it's good enough and extremely widely used.
The real problem is not that "it is good enough"; it's that SQL is still better than many of the newer proposals.
I mean, sure, if newcomer tech $BAR was slightly better than existing tech $FOO, then maybe $FOO might be eventually replaced. What we are seeing is that the newcomers are simply not better than the existing $FOO.
pphysch
I think "SQL" is fine, whatever, I'm used to working with multiple different query and programming languages and dialects. That includes the freedom to define abstractions over SQL that meet my personal needs.
Standard SQL is not helpful, though. If that (failed) experiment was ended, database implementations would have even more freedom to explore superior syntax. Prescriptive language standards are a mistake.
throwaway894345
I like that SQL is a standard, and it's mostly "fine". Sure, I have to constantly read the man pages because there are half a dozen different ways to do fundamentally similar things, and there are subtle differences between each vendor, and I keep running into silly errors like trailing commas. But it mostly works.
The stuff that is more painful is building any kind of interesting application on top of a database. For example, as far as I know, it's very hard to "type check" a query (to get the "type" returned by a given query). It's also hard to efficiently compose SQL. And as far as I know, there's no standard, bulletproof way to escape SQL ("named parameters" is fine when you need to escape parameters, but most of SQL isn't parameters). There's also no good way to express sum types (a "place" can be a "park" or a "restaurant" or a "library", and each of those have different associated data--I don't need a "has_cycling_trails" boolean column for a restaurant, but I do for a park). There are various workarounds, all deeply unsatisfying.
This is mostly all true, but there is little incentive for RDBMS vendors to implement and maintain a second query language, in particular a shared cross-vendor one. Databases are the most long-lived and costly-to-migrate dependencies in IT systems, so keeping the SQL-based interface in parallel for a long time would be mandatory. This is compounded by the standardized SQL-centric database driver APIs like ODBC and JDBC. Despite the shortcomings of SQL, there is no real killer feature that would trigger the required concerted change across the industry.