this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
78 points (86.1% liked)

Programming

17352 readers
346 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

If you're modeling relational data, it doesn't seem like you can get around using a DB that uses SQL, which to me is the worst: most programmers aren't DB experts and the SQL they output is quite often terrible.

Not to dunk on the lemmy devs, they do a good job, but they themselves know that their SQL is bad. Luckily there are community members who stepped up and are doing a great job at fixing the numerous performance issues and tuning the DB settings, but not everybody has that kind of support, nor time.

Also, the translation step from binary (program) -> text (SQL) -> binary (server), just feels quite wrong. For HTML and CSS, it's fine, but for SQL, where injection is still in the top 10 security risks, is there something better?

Yes, there are ORMs, but some languages don't have them (rust has diesel for example, which still requires you to write SQL) and it would be great to "just" have a DB with a binary protocol that makes it unnecessary to write an ORM.

Does such a thing exist? Is there something better than SQL out there?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I'm too lazy to convert that by hand, but here's what chatgpt converted that to for SQL, for the sake of discussion:

SELECT 
    a.id,
    a.artist_name -- or whatever the name column is in the 'artists' table
FROM artists a
JOIN albums al ON a.id = al.artist_id
JOIN nominations n ON al.id = n.album_id -- assuming nominations are for albums
WHERE al.release_date BETWEEN '1990-01-01' AND '1999-12-31'
AND n.award = 'MTV' -- assuming there's a column that specifies the award name
AND n.won = FALSE
GROUP BY a.id, a.artist_name -- or whatever the name column is in the 'artists' table
ORDER BY COUNT(DISTINCT n.id) DESC, a.artist_name -- ordering by the number of nominations, then by artist name
LIMIT 10;

I like Django's ORM just fine, but that SQL isn't too bad (it's also slightly different than your version though, but works fine as an example). I also like PyPika sometimes for building queries when I'm not using Django or SQLAlchemy, and here's that version:

q = (
    Query
    .from_(artists)
    .join(albums).on(artists.id == albums.artist_id)
    .join(nominations).on(albums.id == nominations.album_id)
    .select(artists.id, artists.artist_name)  # assuming the column is named artist_name
    .where(albums.release_date.between('1990-01-01', '1999-12-31'))
    .where(nominations.award == 'MTV')
    .where(nominations.won == False)
    .groupby(artists.id, artists.artist_name)
    .orderby(fn.Count(nominations.id).desc(), artists.artist_name)
    .limit(10)
)

I think PyPika answers your concerns about

What if one method wants the result of that but only wants the artists’ names, but another one wanted additional or other fields?

It's just regular Python code, same as the Django ORM.