Solving every data problem in SQL w/Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing
Is being lazy a good reason to learn SQL? Dimitri Fontaine and Vik Fearing join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Path To Citus Con podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss whether every data problem can be (or should be) solved in SQL. Have you tried to solve all the Advent of Code puzzles with SQL? Or written a book for application developers about The Art of PostgreSQL? Or tried to solve a murder mystery by running SQL queries? Regardless of whether you pronounce SQL as “sequel” or as “ess-cue-ell”, getting skilled at SQL is like going to the gym for exercise. It’s ideal to do it every day to build up your strength. Also, this episode includes an explanation of what a “declarative” language like SQL is—plus a fun segue into time zones.
Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:
Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:
- Dimitri Fontaine’s blog: https://tapoueh.org/
- Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com/
- Dimitri’s book, The Art of PostgreSQL: https://theartofpostgresql.com/
- Blog post about What’s new in SQL:2023: https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new
- PostgreSQL Exercises at pgexercises.com: https://pgexercises.com/
- SQL Murder Mystery for learning SQL: https://mystery.knightlab.com/
- Pgvector extension for Postgres and AI embeddings: https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector
- Vik’s Advent of Code puzzle solutions in SQL on GitHub: https://github.com/xocolatl/advent-of-code
- Stack Overflow data in Postgres, from pgtreats GitHub repo: https://github.com/pgtreats/stackoverflow_in_pg
- OpenStreetMap runs on Postgres: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/38.01/-95.84
- Uber data set: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/uber-tlc-foil-response
- Ideas for fun, open data sets: https://data.world/data-society?entryTypeLabel=dataset&tab=resources
- “Don’t Do This” Timestamp learnings on PostgreSQL wiki: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don't_Do_This#Don.27t_use_timestamp_.28without_time_zone.29
Creators and Guests
Host
Claire Giordano
Claire Giordano is head of the Postgres & Citus open source community initiatives at Microsoft. Claire has served in leadership roles in engineering, product management, and product marketing at Sun Microsystems, Amazon/A9, and Citus Data. At Sun, Claire managed the engineering team that created Solaris Zones, and led the effort to open source Solaris.
Host
Pino de Candia
Pino de Candia is a software dev manager at Microsoft since 2020 and is currently working on the Citus open source project. Pino previously worked on the managed PostgreSQL database service in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, which includes Citus on Azure support for distributed PostgreSQL. Pino has lived in New Orleans since 2017.
Producer
Aaron Wislang
Open Source Engineering + Developer Relations at @Microsoft + @Azure ☁️ | @golang k8s 🐧 🐍 🦀 ☕ 🍷📷 🎹🇨🇦 | 😷 💉++ (inc. bivalent) | @aaronw.dev (on 🟦sky)
Producer
Ariana Padilla
Program Manager at Microsoft in the Azure Database for PostgreSQL team | Avid Traveler 🛫 & Foodie 🍽️🍹
