Years ago, while working at a Venture Capital firm Jim Watson said to me, “if you can make something 10x more efficient, you have a winner”.
Words to live by.
Malloy is an open source semantic data modeling and query language that runs against SQL databases.
Malloy intends to replace SQL for asking questions of data.
Can we make Malloy 10x efficient to ONE query in Malloy vs SQL? No. We can surely make it a little better, but not 10x. If you are just writing ONE query, you won’t see the magic.
But you never just write ONE query. When you are looking at data, you write MANY queries and that is where Malloy gives you the 10x. When you write a calculation, you get to reuse it, like a function in other languages. You can reuse the calculation, the join relationships, even the queries themselves are reusable. The more you query a dataset, the faster you get at asking questions of the data.
We’d love you to try Malloy. But bring a lot of questions.