The past 50 years have seen a great evolution in programming languages — except in the world of databases. There, SQL still reigns supreme; but is it a shark, enduring due to its perfection, or a dinosaur, one impact away from extinction?

We argue that SQL is an amalgamation of both: relational algebra — the shark; and the language — the bloated dinosaur.

PRQL incorporates the beauty of relational algebra while also embracing the best from libraries like dplyr, Pandas, and LINQ to name just a few. It is a functional, pipelined query language with modern ergonomics and expressivity that compiles to SQL, making it usable on any relational database. PRQL is open source, contributor-driven, and committed to staying that way forever.

This talk will motivate why we need a modern query language to replace SQL, introduce PRQL, and demonstrate its elegance and productivity as a language for data.

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

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

Bio:
Tobias is a recovering physicist who traded the abstract world of TQFTs for the slightly less abstract world of financial data (and lived to tell the tale). He's spent the last two decades on a global quest to tame market chaos, armed with a growing arsenal of data languages (SQL, Python, R, and yes, even Excel). Along the way, he's encountered enough NULL values from LEFT JOINs to question the very fabric of reality, which naturally led him to PRQL. He's now a passionate advocate for simpler, more elegant data transformation.