Most complaints I hear regarding SQL can usually be classified in one of the following categories:
That may or may not be true but Date is one of the authors of the SQL standard and one of the leading authors of RDBMS books, so I think we can assume that his criticisms are not those of a "crank".

One thing that does annoy me about Darwen and Date's criticisms is that they are a bit too fond of making statements about facts they have already established and just refering the reader to the paper/article/expensive-book-that-they-just-happen-to-have-written in which they were established. They are struggling against a huge mainstream of standard SQL/RDBMS dogma they need to make their arguments easily accessible and not put the burden on the reader - that's fine for academia with it's well-stocked libraries but a bit much to expect of the casual reader who has not yet drunk their kool-aid.

In reply to Re^2: (OT) Why SQL Sucks (with a little Perl to fix it) by fergal
in thread (OT) Why SQL Sucks (with a little Perl to fix it) by Ovid

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