Against SQL

Thoughts on how compiler and database optimizers should evolve in the future, focusing on predictability and guarantees instead of smarts and heroics

Jamie Brandon wrote a monster of a blog post the other day against SQL. This is my favorite part: To take an example close to my heart: Differential dataflow is a dataflow engine that inc…

This essay covers the design behind Instant. If the schleps we face as UI engineers are actually database problems in disguise, would a database-looking solution solve them?

The views expressed here are my own and not those of my employer. This is my professional online presence, so I won’t share much outside of my engineering work, but in my free time I like to play my guitar & Octatrack, travel, cook, read, and generally enjoy being an aerobic organism hurtling thru space on this beautiful rock. My focus I am forever learning to write elegant & performant systems with a minimum amount of incidental complexity.

We're exploring an approach to simplifying app development: storing all application and UI state in a client-side reactive relational database that provides a structured dataflow model.

Using dataframes to write smaller, faster programs

I just rewatched Gary Bernhardt’s incredible 2012 talk ‘A Whole New World’. This is absolutely one of my favorite tech talksof all time – and it holds up. Be...

Embedding code into strings in another programming language is not great.

This is a post about Datalevin, an open-source database system that I have been building since 2020. Although JOB here is really an acronym for Join Order Benchmark, a benchmark for complex database queries, I intend to build up Datalevin to compete for the same kind of jobs usually held …

Islands in a sea of state.