The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: What Inspires Continued Innovation in Databases?

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Robert Hodges of Altinity.

Welcome to the Data Sack Show prequel. We just chatted with Robert from Ultinity. Super interesting guy. Costas, he has spent 40 years working on and developing databases. 40 years. That's pretty amazing. And he's still so excited about it. I mean, at some points in

the show, he got giddy. He was almost giggling about new real-time use cases. Here's my question for you. Why does someone like Robert keep inventing new interesting things in the database world? I mean, people are continually inventing new databases, right? And a lot of them fail. That's a really hard technology to sort of bring to market in a big way. What's driving them? Well, I think it's what's driving, say, many people that they are into technology in general. I don't think that it has a specific issue with databases, but what I think is very interesting with databases is that it's probably one of the most complex computer systems that you can build,

maybe after an operating system or a compiler. I don't know. And even with combiners, I don't know. And even like with combiners, I don't know, maybe there are toy combiners that you can build that are like easier than moving like a toy database probably. So hopefully not combiner people are listening to what I'm saying right now, but what I'm trying to say is that like, it's just like such a complex technological problem with so many different tradeoffs. Like that's, there's always something new to do there. So when I was like interested in like challenging technical problems, I think Database is like a great place to spend your time.

Also, okay, Database is like probably one of the things that I don't know. I mean, they are around since forever. And for a good reason, because data is what drives technology, right? So it's a very important piece of this industry. So yeah, I mean, I understand people. I also understand people that are like, I don, I understand him. I also understand people that are like, I don't know, obsessed with hardware, for example, although it's not my thing, but yeah, I think it's an amazing

playground, so many different things to play with and you always have something more to do there. It's, you can never say that you reached the point where like, okay, I've done everything. But I agree. I agree. We'll definitely listen to this episode. Robert talks about getting first exposed to databases in 1983 in the military and sort of developing his love for that there. And then he's still doing cool stuff today, which is really interesting.

Also, really fascinating discussion about real time. That's come up multiple times in the show. We know that the definition is all over the place. Real time sort of means a lot of different things to a lot of people, but really fun conversation about some of the real time stuff that we're doing with ClickHouse. So definitely tune in and we will catch you on the episode with Robert.