Type Safety Coming To DB Queries 128
An anonymous reader writes "A new type-safe query language for the popular full-text search platform Solr, called Slashem (a Rogue-like), has just been released. Slashem is implemented as a domain-specific language in Scala, providing compile time type-safety, allowing you do things like date range queries against date fields but keeping you from trying to do a date range query against a string field. Hopefully this trend catches on, resulting in fewer invalid queries exploding at runtime."
Confusing much? (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike [wikipedia.org]
Rogue-like has already been used. It's very confusing to say your DB query language is like a video game.
Re:Confusing much? (Score:3, Informative)
Worse, Slash'EM [slashem.org] is already the name of a (real) rogue-like (game). Obviously these guys are trying for a witty or clever play on "rogue-like" and "slashem", but it just comes off as confusing and lame.
Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score:4, Informative)
Solr serves a different purpose to SQL. It is optimised for searching using text indexing with fancy ways of matching, weighting results when finding matches. Solr is actually a separate non-SQL database that you keep in sync with your real database. I've found it fits its purpose very well, and you rarely worry about the XML as library support handles it.
SQL is great if you already know exactly what you're looking for. Solr is great if a human is performing a search.