Interesting coincidence for me that this hits the front page of HN today as I recently read this article [0].
The author thinks we should move away using the database purely to persist the data, while handling all logic/validation in the server language (e.g. By using an ORM to map your server language to the database) was less robust over time.
Instead, he suggests pushing knowledge of your data into your database as this has proven to be more time resilient and takes advantage of the power of these databases.
I liked the argument (which is better expressed that my paraphrasing) but my largest reservation was that expressiveness is a big consideration for choosing some language, and in this case the alternative to using Ruby/JS/Python + ORM in your MVC framework is to use SQL functions, which are syntactically clunky/dated at the very least.
It seems like Andl is looking to bridge this to some extent.
> Instead, he suggests pushing knowledge of your data into your database as this has proven to be more time resilient and takes advantage of the power of these databases.
Indeed, moving logic into a relational language is a great idea. If only SQL weren't such a poor pseudo-relational language.
Has a better replacement for SQL been created?
I don't know that one has ever been truly implemented, but it's certainly been discussed. Refer to just about any of Chris Date's work, primarily the third manifesto. I do recall reading about a database system that tries to implement the "true" relational model (mostly according to Date, with the exception of his type system), and has a language similar to Date's Tutorial D. I believe it was written in Haskell and showed up here not very long ago. But I can't find it now...