Joining PL/pgSQL Results

Sometimes the Data You Need is Merely “Inferred” by Your Table Data

For many people these days, SQL databases are “yesterday’s news.” NoSQL databases are definitely the “hot new thing” with many Web 2.0 developers. And, indeed, SQL is not a perfect language and there are definitely use cases for which a NoSQL approach might be a better solution.

But, I would not be quick to write off SQL databases as some type of outdated relic of the past. In fact, there were numerous database systems that predated SQL and I, personally, used a handful of “NoSQL” databases before I learned SQL. A new job that required knowledge of Oracle v5 represented my introduction to SQL and I have been an unabashed fan ever since. Over the course of my career, I’ve worked with somewhere around 18 different languages and I can honestly say that SQL is one of my favorites.

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The Most Important Thing

An Insight Requested Decades Ago Has Graduated to the Stature of Wisdom

Many moons ago when I was a young Chief Technology Officer, I was asked by a board member, who was also a professor, to speak to a group of public administration graduate students about the role of senior information technology managers in non-profit organizations. For the discussion, she had paired me with an older CIO/CTO from a large regional hospital, thus giving the students two truly different perspectives. One from a mature, large, and well-funded enterprise, the other from a young, growing, scrappy and perpetually funding-challenged human service agency.

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PostgreSQL From v6.5 (prerelease) to v13.0

Celebrating a truly great open source project!

Let's quickly make sure that the record is straight. I am a database snob. Furthermore, I am unrepentantly and unapologetically this way. I will be dating myself, perhaps badly, but I remember when Microsoft had a product called File (for the early Macintosh) and I cut my (baby) teeth building business applications in a long-forgotten product called DBMaster. There was nothing at all wrong with either of those products, at least not for their time. Indeed, I built solutions out of each that were critical for many, many years to the small business for which they were crafted.

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