I spent the weekend at Stir Trek: Thor Edition in Columbus, OH. While I had a blast speaking about databases, I had even more fun attending and learning. Programming the Cloud with HTTP/REST I knew about REST before I attended this talk and I’ve done a bit of REST programming (right before I decided to nerd out on data), but Mike Amundsen did a great job of convincing me why I should care about REST as a programming paradigm for web developers.

Every November, a bunch of database geeks gather for the Professional Association for SQL Server’s (PASS) international Summit. This year it’s going to be held October 11-24 in Seattle, Washington. I didn’t submit last year since I was involved with the abstract selection process. This year I’m not involved, so I decided to submit a few abstracts. Rewrite Your T-SQL for Great Good! Refactoring SQL is not like refactoring application code.

Astute readers and internet stalkers will have noticed that I left my job at Quest Software back in March. I wasn’t unhappy, I just had the opportunity to take my show on the road and go solo. I’ve had the idea of being my own boss in the back of my head for along time. Suddenly I was confronted with a situation where a former pipe dream was all too real.

I recently covered the internals of a row in PostgreSQL, but that was just the storage piece. I got more curious and decided that I would look into what happens when a row gets updated. There are a lot of complexities to data, after all, and it’s nice to know how our database is going to be affected by updates. Getting Set Up I started by using the customer table from the pagila sample database.

This past weekend I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at the firstSQLPeople event in Richmond, Virginia. The Back Story Back in February, Andy Leonard asked me to speak at a new event. The idea behind his new event was inspiration. Instead of focusing on educating others, Andy asked us to share our own inspiration. Instead of presenting a seminar or training course, the idea was to talk about my work, my vision, and my passion for database technology (to steal Andy’s own words).

We’ve already talked about The Promise and Failure of Federated Databases and Why Don’t We Have Federated Databases. At the end of the second post I concluded that the only real way to solve this problem is to build the federated database ourselves. Before you ask, “Does he really want us to roll our own database” take a deep breath and relax; nobody is going to be writing a database.

I answered a question a few days ago on Stack Overflow about PostgreSQL & SQL Server btree storage fundamentals. After I answered the question, I started thinking more and more about how PostgreSQL stores data on the row. Rather than be content to live in ignorance, I went digging through PostgreSQL’s source code and some hex dumps to find out what was going on inside a row. Getting Started To get started, we’ll create a separate test database that we’ll cunningly calltest.

No, this isn’t a re-run! I’ll be presenting about Refacatoring SQL at SQL Saturday 67 in Chicago this coming Saturday. I’m really excited about this opportunity. I had a blast presenting in Chicago last year and I’m looking forward to doing it again this year. There’s a greatline up of speakers. If you’re in the Chicago area and want to get your learn on, I suggest you swing on by the DeVry Addison campus and check it out.

Federated databases are a dream that have not materialized. The SQL/MEDextension to the ANSI/ISO SQL specification is a step in the right direction. In addition, both SQL Server and Oracle have proprietary extensions that make it possible to query external data sources. If all of this technology is available today, why aren’t more people using it? Why Don’t We Have a Federated Database? If federated databases are such a powerful thing, why hasn’t anyone built one?

One of the biggest problems facing businesses today is integrating data from multiple sources. The holy grail of data integration is called a federated database system. Basically, a federated database stores meta data about other databases and makes it easier to integrate them through a single interface. Many relational databases have features that support integrating with other relational databases through SQL Server’s linked servers or Oracle’s database links. One of the problems with these features is that they only allow relational databases to talk to other relational databases.