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?
ElasticSearch tried. It’s without a doubt one of the worst query languages to use. Nobody can remember how to write the queries, or even reading the aggregations. You literally need the docs open on another monitor.
A solid No from me. But I also never got the ORM hate, ActiveRecord on Ruby made it devine imo, sequelize on JS is fine, Diesel in rust is good
ORM with an easy and straightforward way to execute custom queries is the sweet spot to me. Let the ORM handle the basics (and migrations), override / add optimized queries where relevant.