Despite SQL's enduring success, it is widely accepted that there are serious flaws in the language and a number of authors argue that SQL should be replaced in its entirety. Among many such works, here are some noteworthy arguments:
- A Critique of the SQL Database Language a 1983 paper by C.J. Date,
- Against SQL by Jamie Brandon,
- A Critique of Modern SQL And A Proposal Towards A Simple and Expressive Query Language by Neumann and Leis.
Armed with both sum and product types, super-structured data provides a comprehensive algebraic type system that can represent any JSON value as a concrete type. And since relations are simply product types as originally envisioned by Codd, any relational table can be represented also as a super-structured product type. Thus, JSON and relational tables are cleanly unified with an algebraic type system.
