Path To Citus Con is for developers who love Postgres. Guests join Claire Giordano to discuss the human side of open source, databases, PostgreSQL, and the many PG extensions. Produced as a monthly live show on Discord by the Postgres team at Microsoft, subscribe to our calendar to join us live: https://aka.ms/PathToCitusCon-cal.
https://www.citusdata.com/podcast/path-to-citus-con/
episode 9: 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:
- 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