No one uses SQL to write business logic. It’s written in a programming language with libraries, tests, type safety, and expressive syntax. Traditionally this was the domain of a backend team, who’d try to build enough functionality to keep the frontend team happy without breaking the database. This model hasn’t kept up with the needs of full stack developers though, so they’ve turned to platforms that expose the database directly to code running on client devices. This introduces a host of new problems, like request waterfalls, row-level security, and difficulty implementing complex transactional logic. Like all good database problems it turns out this was already solved in the 80s, as stored procedures written in PL/SQL. No application developer wants to use a niche language that tightly couples business logic with the database though. But what if we just ran stored procedures written in TypeScript, that are integrated directly with application developer flows? It turns out it works, really well.

This talk is part of the SQL or Death? Seminar Series.

Zoom Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/93441451665 (Passcode 261758)

Bio:
James is CTO and cofounder of Convex, the open-source reactive database for app developers. James was Senior Principal Engineer at Dropbox and tech lead on projects including their multi-exabyte geo-distributed storage system, multi-homing Dropbox infra, and building database systems that handle millions of queries per second. James received his PhD at MIT specializing in large-scale distributed transactions and consensus protocols. Rumor has it he has a cover band with his cofounders.