Logica – Declarative logic programming language for data

I don't want to come off as too overconfident, but would be very hard pressed to see the value of this.

At face value, I shudder at the syntax.

Example from their tutorial:

EmployeeName(name:) :- Employee(name:);

Engineer(name:) :- Employee(name:, role: "Engineer");

EngineersAndProductManagers(name:) :- Employee(name:, role:), role == "Engineer" || role == "Product Manager";

vs. the equivalent SQL:

SELECT Employee.name AS name

FROM t_0_Employee AS Employee

WHERE (Employee.role = "Engineer" OR Employee.role = "Product Manager");

SQL is much more concise, extremely easy to follow.

No weird OOP-style class instantiation for something as simple as just getting the name.

As already noted in the 2021 discussion, what's actually the killer though is adoption and, three years later, ecosystem.

SQL for analytics has come an extremely long way with the ecosystem that was ignited by dbt.

There is so much better tooling today when it comes to testing, modelling, running in memory with tools like DuckDB or Ibis, Apache Iceberg.

There is value to abstracting on top of SQL, but it does very much seem to me like this is not it.

Logica is in the Datalog/Prolog/Logic family of programming languages. It's very familiar to anyone who knows how to read it. None of this has anything to do with OOP at all and you will heavily mislead yourself if you try to map any of that thinking onto it. (Beyond that, and not specific to Logica or SQL in any way -- comparing two 3-line programs to draw conclusions is effectively meaningless. You have to actually write programs bigger than that to see the whole picture.)

Datalog is not really a query language, actually. But it is relational, like SQL, so it lets you express relations between "facts" (the rows) inside tables. But it is more general, because it also lets you express relations between tables themselves (e.g. this "table" is built from the relationship between two smaller tables), and it does so without requiring extra special case semantics like VIEWs.

Because of this, it's easy to write small fragments of Datalog programs, and then stick it together with other fragments, without a lot of planning ahead of time, meaning as a language it is very compositional. This is one of the primary reasons why many people are interested in it as a SQL alternative; aside from your typical weird SQL quirks that are avoided with better language design (which are annoying, but not really the big picture.)

> but it is more general, because it also lets you express relations between tables themselves (e.g. this "table" is built from the relationship between two smaller tables), and it does so without requiring extra special case semantics like VIEWs.

If I understand you correctly, you can easily get the same with ephemeral models in dbt or CTEs generally?

> Because of this, it's easy to write small fragments of Datalog programs, and then stick it together with other fragments, without a lot of planning ahead of time, meaning as a language it is very compositional.

This can be a benefit in some cases, I guess, but how can you guarantee correctness with flexibility involved?

With SQL, I get either table or column level lineage with all modern tools, can audit each upstream output before going into a downstream input. In dbt I have macros which I can reuse everywhere.

It's very compositional while at the same time perfectly documented and testable at runtime.

Could you share a more specific example or scenario where you have seen Datalog/ Logica outperform a modern SQL setup?

Generally curious.

I am not at all familiar with the Logica/Datalog/Prolog world.

Prolog et al is a real brain buster. As in it will break your spirits and build you back up better. I remember in college I was able to build a binary tree with 3 lines of code. And once you write the insert, the delete, search, and others just magically appear.

It also frames your thinking about defining what you want rather than how to get it.

If you really want to see the power of these kinds of languages look up Einstein's puzzle solved with prolog. The solution just magically comes out by entering the constraints of the puzzle.