I would like to thank all the who contributed to this discussion. I have found it enlightening, with a number of good points and pointers to tools that will not doubt help me enormously in the future, as I get better acquainted with SQL
I am not so sure I would call SQL simple… I would say SQL looks deceptively simple when used for simple operations… If use are doing simple selects or even simple joins it seems really straight forward… but the ways all the pieces/options can be combined together can get pretty complicated…
For example, without the web, it would have been very hard for me to figure out how to use a CTE (common table expression) to do a RECURSIVE select to retrieve hierarchical data… It’s not exactly intuitive IMO … and SQL can get a lot deeper.
- Karen
The one that was given with Xojo Pro years ago ? I have a license for it, never used. Part of the never used but paid applications.
Also, I will never use (eventually excepted if the Client WANT it) a fancy (in obscure meaning) DB engine.
A brand new DB engine appears every now and then (just like a new Linux flavour). The why of the phenomen is far beyond my head 
[quote=356940:@Emile Schwarz]The one that was given with Xojo Pro years ago ? I have a license for it, never used. Part of the never used but paid applications.
Also, I will never use (eventually excepted if the Client WANT it) a fancy (in obscure meaning) DB engine.
A brand new DB engine appears every now and then (just like a new Linux flavour). The why of the phenomen is far beyond my head :([/quote]
Well the DB engine is just SQLite. It is a multi-user SQLite database. Valentina also sells something similar in their server product.
The network client protocol may be obscure but the database engine is reliable.
Well I did not claim that SQL was simple. I said it was not hard. And naturally you can get into some fairly complexed areas of it and wrapping your head around sets and how to help the query optimizer takes a little work and patience to understand.
However for your typical CRUD stuff SQL is not hard and you can optimize it much further by knowing what fields and relationships you need. Why do two queries and pull tons of columns you don’t need when you can do one join and pull the three columns you need? Those kinds of optimizations are hard when you are not exposed to the SQL itself.
I have made several solutions with both native mac app and web apps, both running with valentina db, both on server or as stand-alone RAM based inside an app.
Valentina has an interperter of SQL, and understand SQL quite well, but also allows you to do much simpler SQL’s but get full results thanks to valentinas interpertations… But then you loose the “real SQL languange”, if that is important to you.
My systems runs very well, and having both SQL and direct API for database connection/manipulation is quite handy.