Mangle – a language for deductive database programming | Hacker News Reader

Mangle – a language for deductive database programming

github.com

103 pointssimonpure19 comments

Anybody who replaces the hoary old albatross of SQL without throwing out the relational algebra baby with the bathwater gets my support. I hope this goes far.

I'm unconvinced the syntax makes a genuine difference. But always interesting to see what folks come up with!

Some notable others:

PreQL/Trilogy - https://github.com/trilogy-data/pytrilogy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40728938

Malloy -https://www.malloydata.dev/ https://github.com/malloydata/malloy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053860

PRQL - https://prql-lang.org/ https://github.com/PRQL/prql https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36866861

> I'm unconvinced the syntax makes a genuine difference

Syntax not, but datalog (-ish) does. It's a more natural way (imho of course) to query data. Far more complex queries with less mental overload.

EdgeQL - https://www.geldata.com/showcase/edgeql

SQL's shortcomings aren't just syntax and the convention of SCREAMING KEYWORDS. There's the lack of algebraic types (particularly galling given the bizarre three-value boolean algebra created by its strange null-handling), the poor composability (why is creating a reusable predicate filter so hard?), the lack of any coherent module system, etc.

The fact that something as simple as a tree is such a nuisance in a "relational" database is ludicrous.

Is this the same "Deductive Database" mathematical programming language of Google DeepMind mentioned in the latest 3b1b guest video by Aleph0 (where they say the language doesnt have a name yet)

https://youtu.be/4NlrfOl0l8U?t=4m8s

I haven’t worked closely with Datalog, but whenever I come across tools that use it, they always seem to extend vanilla Datalog (like this one).

Are there any notable implementations of plain Datalog? If not, what’s the reason? Does vanilla Datalog have major limitations? Just curious.

I think it’s similar to how every sql implementation adds their own extensions.

But iirc datomic came with a quite vanilla datalog implementation.

This is what? The third logic/datalog family query language Google launched? What's the internal story? Does each department have their own query engine?

"This is not an officially supported Google product." For all we know, this is just some people having fun, but because they're having their fun at Google, it needs to be open-sourced under the Google umbrella.

> because they're having their fun at Google

I think it's even worse, even stuff they do in their freetime have to be under the Google umbrella if they want to open-source it, just because they work during the daytime at Google.

Does it depend on jurisdiction? In California, they are free to do whatever they want if they don't compete with employer (a little bit hard in case of Google of course)

No, big tech has restrictive CIIA agreements that apply in California too

Which are the other ones that come to your mind?

I know of PathQuery[0], but that one doesn't have an open source implementation and is much more inspired by Graph query languages than SQL.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09799

Perhaps they have https://logica.dev/ in mind. I think it's more restricted.

Which is, in fact, linked in the readme of this project.

I wanna know what's the difference between the mysql and mangel?

I suggest you read the linked readme. ;)

ok...

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