To be (JOINless) or not to be, that is the question

[Dzordzu]

I know that surrealdb has a model that (as of now) is far away from the traditional, relational dbs. I love the way you can connect records in a graph-like way. Furthermore, I'm waiting impatiently for more graph traversal features! On the other hand, some may consider "relational" join like statement extremely handful. There are plenty of use-cases where JOINs are, at least, useful.

No JOINs. No pain.

Recently I found that statement difficult to agree. I'm using surrealdb as one of backends in my application. It's working more than fine. Cryptography functions, schemaless + schemaful tables within single db, sane graph traversal with exact path - the convenience of the surrealdb is doubtless. Unfortunately, there is a functionality that I'm missing - JOIN statements.

In the database I'm storing a bunch of records. Most of them have the very similar structure. The way they differ is the metadata field structure. It is meant to be schemaful in different ways for different tables. In that moment I would love to be able to JOIN them by one of the fields. All I need is a statement that will combine data from two different tables. Ideally, it could recreate relations on the merge result.

I'm not alone

• Stackoverflow question