Peter Eisentraut, a PostgreSQL core team member and EDB engineer, writes about SQL standards, PostgreSQL development, replication history and patch submission.
HN commenters link it as a clear overview of what's new in SQL:2023 and how PostgreSQL supports it, including SQL/PGQ graph queries and JSON features.
This technical arguments in this article aren't that coherent in my view. I'm not sure if this is the reporter's fault or some Couchbase marketing film-flam (err, which would still end up being the reporter's fault.) It could be me I suppose; judge for yourself:
The first half suggests Chamberlain ("SQL co-creator") supports NoSQL which avoids the relational model and in many cases is oriented around more of a key-value store with eventual consistency for better handling certain scalability use cases. Slightly eyebrow-raising that the SQL co-creator agrees, but I don't think there's a huge technical dispute that you can scale better if you allow eventual consistency. Whether it's wise is debatable but of course there will always be a use case where it is arguably wise.
The second half talks about SQL++ (which Chamberlain apparently worked on) which AWS calls PartiQL whose value proposition is better/easier parsing of JSON.
I am not clear how relaxing ACID properties to scale is related to JSON other than that a bunch of early NoSQL databases (MongoDB? Couchbase?) tried to do both.
I am no PartiQL/SQL++ expert but I have used PartiQL and it is pretty much SELECT... FROM... etc SQL with some fancy features for JSON handling. With standard transactional semantics. You can do similar JSON-type handling in Postgres and Snowflake and other tooling from what I can tell, although I'd be a bit surprised if some of the SQL++/PartiQL dot notation and array subscripting for…
Guide to ANY_VALUE() Functionality in PostgreSQL 16. Vik Fearing, PostgreSQL Expert at EDB has contributed to add this functionality as per the SQL:2023 standard (T626). Peter Eisentraut, Chief Engineer at EDB and Core Team Member of PostgreSQL, actively worked on the SQL:2023 standard and has published details about it in his blog here: http://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new.
For more enhancements, check out the following link: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/16/release-16.html#RELEASE-16-FUNCTIONS
Graph databases aren't particularly relevant to a novel syntax for relational databases. The part of the related standard that is about relational databases (SQL/PGQ) demands that every table hold either edges or vertices, but not both [1], which is very limiting.
[1] https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new
See also [1] for how this (might) relate to PostgreSQL
In particular it is nice to see that a core dev views JSON dot accessing and PCQ as "sensible" future additions to Postgres.
[1] - https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/18/postgresql-and-sql-2023
The major news are:
- SQL/PGQ - A Graph Query Language
- JSON improvements (a JSON type, simplified notations)
Peter Eisentraut gives a nice overview here: http://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new
A co-worker of mine actually wrote on replication in postgres recently:
http://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2015/03/03/the-history-of-replication-in-postgresql/