

Announcing NoNoSQL - mcantelon
http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1273859940.html

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thwarted
_Because if your way of interacting with the database is encoded in a
consistent JSON format, then the server can analyze it easier to decide what
to do. That should make sharding and clustering a lot easier._

This wording makes it sound like this is an advantage for the server, that it
enables things you otherwise wouldn't be able to do _in the server_. But even
with SQL, something, usually the server, parses the text/string based query
into what is essentially a format similar to this. Sharding and clustering
would be "easier" too if you didn't need to do them in your application, if
the server side stuff just handled it. Removing the need to parse SQL can
remove the need to do that from your stack, but the server usually handles
this anyway. The way we think about sharding and clustering now usually puts
that functionality into the application or into middleware where you need to
be aware of it. There's nothing stopping a server from taking a text based SQL
query and offloading all those scaling features from the app itself.

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mcantelon
Enter the ZSL: "I'm leaning toward BSD license but if your company uses any
Ruby it'll be AGPL."

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zedshaw
Ha, maybe that'll be it. Although the Zed Shaw Celebutant License was better.

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bruceba
You should look at Metaweb query language
(<http://mql.freebaseapps.com/ch03.html>) -- it uses JSON in a reasonably
intelligent way to do precisely this.

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philf
"Now why do this? Because if your way of interacting with the database is
encoded in a consistent JSON format, then the server can analyze it easier to
decide what to do."

It could also parse the SQL query.

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thristian
To be fair, JSON is much, much simpler to parse than SQL.

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keefe
I've written a SPARQL query parser, which is somewhat similar to SQL. Parsing
the string into your internal memory representation is not the hard part of
writing a query engine. It's really not difficult to transform SQL into the
JSON/SQL shown in the article.

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rbranson
What makes this so great is how many people will take it seriously and angrily
comment about this absurdity. Zed Shaw is the only person I know of that will
troll by writing extensive amounts of code. It's rather incredible.

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johnrob
Very interesting. I would love it if mysql server natively supported a json
interface like this. The db would become a web service... how trendy!

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jawngee
Like the use of Grace.

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jacktang
why not couchdb?

