I'm going to disagree. A partial implementation of SQL would go a long way to clearing the stigma of "You old RDBMS users don't know what you're doing" that NoSQL engenders.
They are database operations, originally implemented against database management systems that attempt to map relational algebra (set operations) onto data stores. There is nothing in the SQL grammar that prevents its implementation outside RDBMS.
> "Doesn't work because those are set operations which are meaningless outside the relational world. If you want to use set operations, use a relational database."
I don't want to do set operations, I want to retrieve data.
SELECT * FROM user_collection WHERE city = 'Bronx'
expresses a desire for data, not a desire to perform a bunch of set operations, and should be functionality that is provided but the database vendor since we've had SQL since the 1980s and "everybody" knows SQL.
It is telling that they explain API examples in terms of SQL SELECT statements. I infer that if they wanted to do the work they could provide a SQL processor, and extrapolate to every other API-only datastore.
They are database operations, originally implemented against database management systems that attempt to map relational algebra (set operations) onto data stores. There is nothing in the SQL grammar that prevents its implementation outside RDBMS.
> "Doesn't work because those are set operations which are meaningless outside the relational world. If you want to use set operations, use a relational database."
I don't want to do set operations, I want to retrieve data.
SELECT * FROM user_collection WHERE city = 'Bronx' expresses a desire for data, not a desire to perform a bunch of set operations, and should be functionality that is provided but the database vendor since we've had SQL since the 1980s and "everybody" knows SQL.
Take a look at this page form MongoDB's web site: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Mongo+Query+Language
It is telling that they explain API examples in terms of SQL SELECT statements. I infer that if they wanted to do the work they could provide a SQL processor, and extrapolate to every other API-only datastore.