What does HackerNews think of malloy?

Ask HN: Does anyone else think SQL needs help? | Sep 2022

You sound like the exact target for Malloy, which was posted to HN recently:

https://github.com/looker-open-source/malloy

A sequel to SQL? An intro to Malloy | Sep 2022

This is the example at https://github.com/looker-open-source/malloy

  query: table('malloy-data.faa.flights') -> {
    where: origin ? 'SFO'
    group_by: carrier
    aggregate:
      flight_count is count()
      average_flight_time is flight_time.avg()
  }


  SELECT
     carrier,
     COUNT(*) as flight_count,
     AVG(flight_time) as average_flight_time
  FROM `malloy-data.faa.flights`
  WHERE origin = 'SFO'
  GROUP BY carrier
  ORDER BY flight_count desc         -- malloy automatically orders by the first aggregate

I don't see much value in this. This is not aesthetically better than SQL. It's also semantically better. This is just a different syntax that would parse to the same AST. And what's with the `?` for equality?!

Show HN: PRQL – A proposal for a better SQL | Jan 2022

Expand Context ↕

Thanks!

I agree that integrating with the DB would allow much more from a lang. But PRQL is a bet that languages which start there (e.g Kusto) get lost because it requires changing DB, which is really hard. I worry EdgeDB may hit this issue too (but I'm really hoping it works, and they have an excellent team).

As I think you're suggesting — you could imagine a language starting out as a transpiler, and then over time DBs working with it directly, cutting out some of the impediment mismatch.

Malloy [1] is another point in space — it targets existing DBs through SQL queries but can also ask for schemas etc while developing.

[1] https://github.com/looker-open-source/malloy