In a recent debate about NoSQL vs. SQL on Hackernews, I was made aware of a quite amusing paper by Erik Meijer and Gavin Bierman. Remember, Erik Meijer has brought LINQ to the .NET universe, a formidable unified query DSL whose main purpose was to unify typesafe querying against XML, SQL, and object-oriented data structures.
It is important to note that LINQ surfaced shortly before the NoSQL hype really caught on, so NoSQL data structures (e.g. key / value stores, document stores, graph databases) were not yet in scope for LINQ, and LINQ providers might have had to tweak the odd implementation detail to fully match the LINQ API.
What Erik Meijer and Gavin Bierman are claiming in their article (which was also discussed intensively on Hackernews) is the fact that SQL and NoSQL are duals of each other, i.e. two sides of the same coin. In their quest to unify all query languages, the LINQ people would obviously love to simplify things to such a level. To us, who are focusing on SQL only via jOOQ, this seems more like a plea for LINQ than anything else. It would be all too nice if things were as easy as a simple duality, specifically given the fact that Erik Meijer has now also created a company called Applied Duality Inc… What we found very interesting, though, is Erik’s and Gavin’s hint about the relational model and other models inversing arrows between relationships. When child records point to parent records in the relational model, parent objects point to child objects in object-oriented design, or in XML.
But history will teach us where these things go. I currently don’t see a second E.F. Codd to solve the complexity introduced with the new abundance of NoSQL data stores – yet. But maybe, we’ll eventually remember Erik Meijer as the new E.F. Codd, bringing NoSQL to full circle.
Filed under: sql Tagged: Applied Duality, Codd, E.F. Codd, Erik Meijer, NoSQL, relational algebra, sql
