Jamie Brandon

Against SQL

But SQL is the only widely-used implementation of the relational model, and it is:

Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

I've been using zig for ~4 months worth of side projects, including a toy text editor and an interpreter for a relational language . I've written ~10kloc.

Small Tech

I frequently see debates about whether it's better to be a cog at a giant semi-monopoly, or to take investment money in the hopes of one day growing to be head cog at a giant semi-monopoly.

Fast B-Trees

( This is part of a series on the design of zest . See the list of posts here .)

How safe is Zig?

I keep seeing discussions that equate zig's level of memory safety with c (or occasionally with rust!). Neither is particularly accurate. This is an attempt at a more detailed breakdown.

Three months of Rust

The State of Linux Debuggers

Why isn't differential dataflow more popular?

Differential dataflow is a library that lets you write simple dataflow programs and a) then runs them in parallel and b) efficiently updates the outputs when new inputs arrive. Compared to competition like spark and kafka streams , it can handle more complex computations and provides dramatically better throughput and…

SQL is syntactic sugar for relational algebra

This idea is particularly sticky because it was more or less true 50 years ago, and it's a passable mental model to use when learning sql. But it's an inadequate mental model for building new sql frontends, designing new query languages, or writing tools likes ORMs that abstract over sql.

The program is the database is the interface

That transfer to John Smith isn't covered by any of the tagging rules. So I select the date, switch to the editor window and paste the date into the date->tag definition:

Speed Matters

I think that one of the most important things to focus on improving is how fast you can work.

Things Unlearned

One of my favorite questions to ask people is: what are some things that you used to strongly believe but have now changed your mind about?

Pinephone first steps

After anki trashed my history, uploaded the trashed history to the sync server, and then repeatedly re-synced the trashed history every time I tried to restore from backup, I wrote my own spaced repetition app. It reads input from a markdown file, asks questions in the terminal and stores state in a json file. I wrote…

An opinionated map of incremental and streaming systems

Disclaimer: I used to work for Materialize which is one of the systems being compared in this post.

Zero-copy deserialization in Julia

SELECT wat FROM sql

Thanks to Nikhil Benesch, Justin Jaffray and several decades of "wouldn't it be nice if..." for contributions.

SQL needed structure

The data on the page is presented in a hierarchichal structure. The movie page contains a director, a list of genres, a list of actors, and each actor in the list contains a list of characters they played in the movie. You can't sensibly fit all of this into a single flat structure like a relation.

What is the point of an online conference?

My experience of online conferences has mostly been underwhelming. They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference.

Baby's first WASM compiler

( This is part of a series on the design of zest . See the list of posts here .)

Why start a new database conference?

Somehow I am organizing a conference called Have you tried rubbing a database on it?

Why query planning for streaming systems is hard

Many groups are working on running sql queries in incremental/streaming systems . Query planning in this context is not a well understood problem. This post is a quick pointer towards the many open problems. It's not intended to be complete or authoritative, because I haven't engaged with the problem much beyond…

Frugality Is Non-Linear (2019)

Most people have a mental model of budgeting which is roughly linear. If you spend half as much money, your money will last twice as long. As you approach zero spending, your runway goes up to infinity.