Abstract
Most databases use SQL as the interface to access relational data. Because of that, we associate SQL to be the language of relational algebra. But its affinity with the English language and unclear and inconsistent semantics leave a lot of space for improvements. A deep dive into the language highlights many examples of convoluted or confusing language design, which we just got used to.
The solution we propose is PRQL, which does away with all but the relation data model. It uses a minimal set of syntactic features to construct pipelines of functions. These functions transform relations from the tables where they are stored into the desired result. This simplifies the mental model needed to wrangle with data, while improving the ergonomics of writing code with features of modern programming languages.
This new language can be compiled to most SQL dialects, which makes it portable and reusable, important factors of OLAP. Decoupling the language from the database also increases the speed of the development cycle by failing early and providing clear error messages.
Interview
Multi-backend full text search support for EdgeDB.
I want people to see that the relational model is more than SQL and that our data tooling is in many ways quite obsolete.
Data engineers and people interested in programming language design.
I want them to understand PRQL and be able to translate simple SQL queries to PRQL.
Topics
QCon San Francisco 2023 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
From the same track
Monday 2 October
10:35 Ballroom A Session Graph Databases LIquid: A Large-Scale Relational Graph Database Scott Meyer Distinguished Software Engineer @LinkedIn, Creator of the Graph Database, LIquid, Metaweb/freebase Alum We describe LIquid(1 2), the graph database built to host LinkedIn. 11:45 Seacliff ABC Session Data PRQL: A Simple, Powerful, Pipelined SQL Replacement Aljaž Mur Eržen Compiler Developer @EdgeDB & PRQL Maintainer Most databases use SQL as the interface to access relational data. Because of that, we associate SQL to be the language of relational algebra. But its affinity with the English language and unclear and inconsistent semantics leave a lot of space for improvements. 13:35 Ballroom A Session Stream Processing Streaming Databases: Embracing the Convergence of Stream Processing and Databases Yingjun Wu Founder and CEO @RisingWave Labs, Previously Engineer @AWS Redshift & Researcher @IBM Research Almaden Streaming databases have gained significant attention in recent years. From its name, it is evident that a streaming database combines the power of stream processing and databases. 14:45 Ballroom A Session Distributed Systems Redesigning OLTP for a New Order of Magnitude Joran Greef Founder and CEO @TigerBeetle The world is becoming more transactional. From colocation and server rental to serverless and usage-based billing. From coal to clean energy and smart meters that arbitrage solar prices 1440 times a month instead of monthly. Not to mention FedNow or the tsunami of instant payments. 15:55 Ballroom A Session Data Lakes Incremental Data Processing with Apache Hudi Saketh Chintapalli, Bhavani Sudha Saktheeswaran Incremental Data Processing is an emerging style of data processing gathering attention recently that has the potential to deliver orders of magnitude speed and efficiency over traditional batch processing on data lakes and data warehouses. 17:05 Ballroom A Session Architecture Sleeping at Scale - Delivering 10k Timers per Second per Node with Rust, Tokio, Kafka, and Scylla Lily Mara, Hunter Laine As a part of OneSignal’s no-code Journeys system, we knew that we would need a way to store billions of timers.