[Developers] MQL Lite (was newbie: simple question)

[Shawn Simister]

Pito Salas wrote:
> MQL is crazy complex though; anyone consider creating an MQL-lite?
> Yeah I realize the complexity is probably justified so as to be
> completely general and not assume anything, but it creates a major
> barrier to use IMO.
>   
Pito,

I dunno if I'd say MQL is really /that/ complex. It takes some time to 
get used to the JSON structure of the queries when you're used to 
writing SELECT queries but once you get the hang of that I find it's 
actually pretty straight-forward. There is very little mandatory syntax 
is MQL so a query can be as simple as:

{"capital":null, "type":"/location/country", "name":"Peru"}

For me, the hardest part is getting to know all the commons data types 
and which types/properties to use for which queries. Usually the best 
way to do that is to look up a couple sample topics in Freebase and see 
which schema it uses, then you can click through to the schema to find 
the property IDs.

For the sake of argument, I'm sure it would be possible to write some 
wrapper code to query Freebase with a more traditional SELECT query 
syntax but the challenge of knowing which properties to use would still 
be there and as you said, more complex queries might not be possible.

SELECT capital FROM /location/country WHERE name = 'Peru';

What features would you look for in MQL Lite? What are the parts of MQL 
that you find the hardest to learn as a beginner?

Shawn
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