Which are the SQL improvements you are waiting for?

Question

Dealing with SQL shows us some limitations and gives us an opportunity to imagine what could be.

Which improvements to SQL are you waiting for? Which would you put on t

Answer 1

I know it's wildly unrealistic, but I wish they'd make the syntax of INSERT and UPDATE consistent. Talk about gratuitous non-orthogonality.

Answer 2

I would like to see the ability to use Regular Expressions in string handling.

Answer 3

I'd like the vendors to actually standardise their SQL. They're all guilty of it. The LIMIT/OFFSET clause from MySQL and PostGresql is a good solution that no-one else appears to do. Oracle has it's own syntax for explicit JOINs whilst everyone else uses ANSI-92. MySQL should deprecate the CONCAT() function and use || like everyone else. And there are numerous clauses and statements that are outside the standard that could be wider spread. MySQL's REPLACE is a good example. There's more, with issues about casting and comparing types, quirks of column types, sequences, etc etc etc.

Answer 4

Improved pivot tables. I'd like to tell it to automatically create the columns based on the keys found in the data.

Answer 5

Increased temporal database support in Sql Server. Intervals, overlaps, etc.

Increased OVER support in Sql Server, including LAG, LEAD, and TOP.

Answer 6

My wish list (for SQLServer)

1. Ability to store/use multiple execution plans for a stored procedure concurrently and have the system automatically understand the best stored plan to use at each execution.

Currently theres one plan - if it is no longer optimal its used anyway or a brand new one is computed in its place.

2. Native UTF-8 storage

3. Database mirroring with more than one standby server and the ability to use a recovery model approaching 'simple' provided of course all servers are up and the transaction commits everywhere.

4. PCRE in replace functions

5. Some clever way of reusing fragments of large sql queries, stored match conditions, select conditions...etc. Similiar to functions but actually implemented more like preprocessor macros.