Big News in Databases — Review 2023
Twice a year I review the news articles from the past six months and report on the most interesting ones…after a break, it’s that time again! Subscribe the newsletter to receive future issues.
The SQL Successor Arrived
The SQL successor has arrived! It is SQL. The long-awaited new revision of the SQL standard was published in June 2023. SQL:2016 is history and I hope that SQL:2023 won’t live that long.
The majority of the news relates to JSON and a completely new sublanguage to query property graphs (think Cypher). Besides that, there are quite some small enhancements…many of them standardizing functionality that is already available in some SQL dialects. I’ll cover these on modern-sql.com (subscribe e-mail, Twitter, RSS). Until then, please refer to Peter Eisentraut’s article on SQL:2023.
Sometimes Clouds Bring Rain
In the beginning, the advantages of the cloud are just overwhelming. In particular, the very quick provisioning of high-grade services are impressive. Just click for a database including backup and fully automatic failover to a different data center. Naturally, the industry leaders Amazon, Microsoft and Google offer virtually unlimited hardware and bandwidth along with a very wide selection of such high-grade services. Nobody has to study the installation and backup manuals to run a new service with confidence. The fee schedule often lists amounts per hour in cent. It is cheap.
As long as there is competition for new cloud customers, the market puts pressure on the pricing of the providers. Every provider wants to attract the not-in-the-cloud-yet workloads. Low prices are an easy way to encourage adoption, however, that mechanism doesn’t work once virtually everybody is in the cloud. The costs of changing from one provider to another are very high. From a purely economic perspective, providers could soon add their client’s cost of change to their very own fee schedule without losing many customers. Just because it is cheap today doesn’t mean it will be cheap forever.
But what are the alternatives? People who can turn delivered hardware into working infrastructure that runs your services are virtually nonexistent. It is even hard to find personnel that runs your services on rented hardware in a colocation center. This know-how was lost. Instead you can hire people who are certified to use AWS, GCP or Azure. Everybody pretends that this is fine. Hardly anyone prepares for that case that their sole provider of business-critical services gets some funny ideas like using your data to train their AI model. Or increasing the prices. Or introducing new fees. Or discontinuing a service you are depending on. Or just sacking silently.
Sustainable businesses must prepare for these cases. They should have a plan for how to leave their current cloud provider, either for a different cloud provider or to a more traditional data center. For that it is important to keep the number of used services small. It is even more important not to use proprietary services. The ability to change providers is a prerequisite for competition to work, moreover it enables you to actually change if needed—otherwise, you’ll find yourself in a “vendor-lock-in-on-steroids”.
To conclude, I’d like to highlight two examples of recent cloud exits. The first one did not really leave the cloud, it was just a migration from high-grade services to lower grade services on the same cloud provider. Yet they achieved higher scalability and resilience while reducing costs by 90%. Ironically, it was the Prime Video team at Amazon that figured this out. The e-mail provider HEY really left the cloud for their own hardware and now saves 1.5 million dollar a year. Additionally, the response time went down by 45%. It’s clear that having an exit scenario is required anyway for a sustainable business. Once you have one, it might even turn out that the exit scenario is the best option right away.
Technology and Science
First of all I’d like to refer to Andy Pavlo’s article “Databases in 2023: A Year in Review”. It also covers vector databases, for which I had a few consulting requests during the year. The article also highlights the financial difficulties MariaDB is facing. (A previous version of this article mentioned technical problems, but that turned out to be totally my fault).
Looking into how other SQL implementations have evolved recently, I must say that 2023 was a rather quiet year. The one big change was that Oracle 23c finally got some decades overdue standard SQL functionality. Most noteworthy are better support of the values clause and a proper boolean type. Except for the limited 23cFREE release, Oracle 23c is not yet available for on-premises installation—even though 23c refers to the year 2023. However, I can hear a whisperer form Oracle: “Come to the cloud. 23c has been there since September”. I cannot resist to add: “…and make yourself dependent on the new features, because they are only available in the cloud”.
New Articles and Recordings
German Podcast: Modernes SQL ist mehr als SELECT * FROM
New Article: Generated always as (…)
New Article: Merge
New Article: Greatest(), least()
New Article: Search depth/breadth first
New Article: The Curious Case of the Aggregation Query
In all Brevity (Twitter, BlueSky)
Larry Ellison’s Masterpiece: Microsoft Becomes Oracle’s Largest Customer!
Everybody who uses command line database clients (mysql, psql, sqlite, sqlcl, ...) must check out this repo: https://github.com/okbob/pspg
Indexing “LIKE” in PostgreSQL and Oracle: This extraordinary article by Laurenz Albe explains why some collations are inherently incompatible with LIKE.
Spring Data and Spring Data Neo4j join the “No OFFSET Movement!”
SQL Renaissance Ambassador
As the SQL Renaissance Ambassador, it’s my mission to make developers aware of the evolution of SQL in the 21st century. My book “SQL Performance Explained” has been published in five languages and can be read online free of charge at use-the-index-luke.com. My next book is currently in the works and can already be read online as it’s being written (modern-sql.com). I am available as a trainer, speaker and consultant for all companies and developers interested in SQL. You’ll find more info at winand.at.