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Database Protocols Are Underwhelming

If you’ve been in this trade for a while, you have probably seen dozens of debates on the merits and problems of SQL as a relational database query language. As an ORM maintainer, I have a few gripes with SQL, but overall it is workable, and anyway, it has so much inertia that there’s no point fantasizing about a replacement.

But from the feedback I got when Mike Perham replaced the redis gem with redis-client in Sidekiq, lots of users started noticing reports of errors they wouldn’t experience before, showing how unreliable remote data stores can be in practice, especially in cloud environments. I fully understand that relational databases are much bigger beasts than an in-memory key-value store, hence it likely is harder to implement, but if I was ever asked what feature MySQL or PostgreSQL could add to make them nicer to work with, it certainly would be this one. Relational databases are extremely impressive projects, clearly built by very smart people, but It feels like the developer experience isn’t very high on their priority list, if it’s even considered.

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