Comment from the Ruby on Rails blog:

John Griffiths on 30 Nov 17:23:

There are currently two things I really believe in right now, SQL and Web 2.0.

He goes on to say about Ruby on Rails:

it’s like PHP on ACID!

Okay, quoting that second snippet was purely gratuitous on my part.

I was about to write about something else, but then I read this. I suppose my first reaction was along the lines of Help us all if SQL is one of the two things left to believe in. Of course, that would have been before I saw that Web 2.0 was the second. Incidentally, no, I don’t think he meant the word believe in the way I just took it. But the fact that I initially read it that way is why I’m blogging about it.

Wait, why am I blogging about it?

Oh, right. I think it’s that SQL is something that can be “believed” in. I do like SQL because it is a roughly standardized language for interacting with all sorts of databases…in theory…anyway, more standarized anyway than, say, javascript. And the sad thing is that that level of standardization is to be so admired, especially when the standard is insane. Yes, yes, okay, making it roughly english maybe makes it easier for it to sent as a stream of text, but I think we can safely jump off that train now…please…it’s 200-friggin-6. Dagnab string of bytes…

I’m rambling.

I would like to see a lower-level standard for interacting with databases, that has nothing to do with writing english statements, but which each language could use in the way that best fit that language. And, yes, SQL could be one of those languages. And that standard could let the db specify validation rules such that the db-interacting library (a la ActiveRecord) could use those validations instead of requiring the programmer to define them in the model or elsewhere. Also, relationships between tables…

Of course, those are just my momentarily rambling thoughts…