Solving every data problem in SQL w/Dimitri Fontaine & Vik Fearing | Talking Postgres Ep09
Is being lazy a good reason to learn SQL? Dimitri Fontaine and Vik Fearing join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Talking Postgres podcast (formerly called Path To Citus Con*)—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.
*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com and on this YouTube playlist: https://aka.ms/TalkingPostgres-playlist
Guests Dimitri Fontaine and Vik Fearing:
Dimitri is a PostgreSQL Major Contributor (design, review, Extensions, Event Triggers, etc). He maintains and develops pg_auto_failover, pgcopydb, pgloader and other software. Dimitri has also written “The Art of PostgreSQL”, a book that teaches application developers to replace thousands of lines of code with simple SQL queries.
Vik is a PostgreSQL Major Contributor and member of the SQL Standards committee. He is the co-founder of pgDay Paris and co-organizer of PGConf EU 2023. Currently a PostgreSQL Expert and member of the CTO Team at EDB.
Chapters:
⏩ 00:00 Intro & how to pronounce SQL
⏩ 3:50 Why talk to Dimitri & Vik about SQL
⏩ 7:09 How did you get started with SQL?
⏩ 18:41 From app code to database. Art or science?
⏩ 24:00 Antipatterns in PostgreSQL
⏩ 26:55 Object Relational Models (ORMs).
⏩ 31:52 Pushing down patterns from app to database?
⏩ 42:28 Is the size of the standard a problem?
⏩ 45:28 Favorite resources to learn SQL
⏩ 57:09 Open data sets
⏩ 59:26 Generative AI: Should you ask Copilot?
⏩ 1:02:32 Time zone fun
📜 Full transcript of this podcast episode available at: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/...
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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/202...
🔹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...
🔹Stack Overflow data in Postgres, from pgtreats GitHub repo: https://github.com/pgtreats/stackover...
🔹OpenStreetMap runs on Postgres: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/...
🔹Uber data set: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/ub...
🔹Ideas for fun, open data sets: https://data.world/data-society?entry...
🔹“Don’t Do This” Timestamp learnings on PostgreSQL wiki: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don'...
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