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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

IMO XML failed because of mismatch between programming language structures and storage format. JSON is perfect because it maps 1:1 to arrays and objects. XML does not. There were whole ORM projects to map XML to data structures.

That's a fundamental issue and replacing XML was not that hard.

My prediction is that SQL will fail too. There are infinite attempts to dethrone it. And the reason is the same: tabular data does not map well to our data structures.

Dethroning SQL much harder, though. It'll take decades.

We introduced fundamental roadblocks into IT and river of time will either break those roadblocks or smooth them into shapes hardly recognizable (SQL + JSON, for example).

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> My prediction is that SQL will fail too. There are infinite attempts to dethrone it. And the reason is the same: tabular data does not map well to our data structures.

I'm deeply skeptical.

The relational data model is fundamentally about correctly representing relationships between data. Whereas data structures are about efficiently using computer hardware to perform computation on that data.

I don't see either going away, because they're driven by fundamental needs.

SQL is a pretty decent language. Sure it could be improved and made more intuitive and maybe even simpler. Relational data maps directly to objects if you have halfway decent tooling. SQL is almost 50 years old now - it'll be here for a long time because it is actually useful paradigm that has not been outdone by other paradigms (so far).

> Dethroning SQL much harder, though. It'll take decades.

Maybe not decades. I personally love EdgeDB (https://www.edgedb.com/) as an SQL replacement.

> My prediction is that SQL will fail too...And the reason is the same: tabular data does not map well to our data structures.

The whole point of SQL is that relations and relational data are not data structures. They are higher level concepts and data structures are implementation details. The reason it has survived 4+ decades is because it isn't intrinsically tied to those implementation details and instead can be reimplemented over and over and over.

> There are infinite attempts to dethrone it.

Viewed another way, there are infinite attempts to reinvent it, all of which keep failing, because they aren't as good.

To dethrone SQL, you won't cut it with just average techbro hype. You need the top award of SIGMOD renamed in honor of your paradigm's inventor levels of hype.

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