Queryability and the Sublime Mediocrity of SQL

> There are also a lot of queries that SQL is awful at, like most things involving graphs. That's why things like graph- and time-series databases have market niches.

Criticizing a general-purpose tool for special-purpose shortcomings never fails to fail at impressing.

bad model

you should use sql table inheritance to represent an individual scientist or a group of scientists as the same (abstract) thing

then you can point a foreign key at an individual scientist or a group

and if you use single table inheritance, querying is trivial (but you have to live w some null columns)

SQL is like Javascript: it succeeds by ubiquity, not quality.