“May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course.”
"Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation."
When a DBMS that claims it is relational and yet it supports SQL's "features" that departs from the relational model, then that DBMS is not relational.
If a DBMS is "slow" or "fast", that is not because of SQL -- it is because of the specific implementation decisions that the makers of that DBMS took.
And that has nothing to do with what you just said.
"The talks in this series will present ideas on either (1) making SQL go as fast as possible or (2) replacing SQL with something better."
How were you able to infer that the existence of the word "go" in that phrase refers to optimizers?
And 2nd idea/proposal of "replacing SQL with something better" really implies that they are talking about the language and not the optimizer.
In any case, if they really meant "optimizer" then their phrasing is very vague and imprecise; if they are talking about the "optimizer" -- then which specific optimizer? They have failed to mention that too.
you cannot make a language fast, only its underlying implementation (i.e the specific dbms).
and this is the error I see 90% of the time. there is a confusion between conceptual (model) vs implementation concerns.
the problem with SQL the language is its conceptual foundations -- that it is not currently relational and yet it is used as the language of "relational" DBMSes in the market.
> If your signup form has an optional field for a full name which I don’t fill in, I still have a name. Just because a value is not known by your database doesn’t mean it isn’t defined.
There's the Closed World Assumption in a database.