Why use SQL database?
- by martinthenext
I'm not quite sure stackoverflow is a place for such a general question, but let's give it a try.
Being exposed to the need of storing application data somewhere, I've always used MySQL or sqlite, just because it's always done like that. As it seems like the whole world is using these databases, most of all software products, frameworks, etc. It is rather hard for a beginning developer like me to ask a question - why?
Ok, say we have some object-oriented logic in our application, and objects are related to each other somehow. We need to map this logic to the storage logic, so we need relations between database objects too. This leads us to using relational database and I'm ok with that - to put it simple, our database rows sometimes will need to have references to other tables' rows. But why do use SQL language for interaction with such a database?
SQL query is a text message. I can understand this is cool for actually understanding what it does, but isn't it silly to use text table and column names for a part of application that no one ever seen after deploynment? If you had to write a data storage from scratch, you would have never used this kind of solution. Personally, I would have used some 'compiled db query' bytecode, that would be assembled once inside a client application and passed to the database. And it surely would name tables and colons by id numbers, not ascii-strings. In the case of changes in table structure those byte queries could be recompiled according to new db schema, stored in XML or something like that.
What are the problems of my idea? Is there any reason for me not to write it myself and to use SQL database instead?
