1
Against SQL
But SQL is the only widely-used implementation of the relational model, and it is:
Jamie Brandon
I don't know what they want from it, how they can be satisfied with the petty round of grant money, publication, and prizes. Whereas I have always known, deep down. I spent endless hours in the stacks, looking hopelessly for the one book that would show me the way forward, that would unlock Dimension Zeta. I wanted…
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2
Fast B-Trees
( This is part of a series on the design of zest . See the list of posts here .)
3
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…
4
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.
5
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:
6
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.
7
SELECT wat FROM sql
Thanks to Nikhil Benesch, Justin Jaffray and several decades of "wouldn't it be nice if..." for contributions.
8
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.
9
Why start a new database conference?
Somehow I am organizing a conference called Have you tried rubbing a database on it?
10
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…