Designing a new SQL language feature: Key joins
October 20–23
Back in 2021 Joel approached me with an idea: what if we could take inspiration from graph databases and allow people people to use foreign key relationships to express joins so people could do a bit less typing and at the same time avoid the risk of typos when writing the ON clause. Sounds pretty simple, right?
This talk tells the story all the way from the initial idea to, five years later, the submission of a formal change proposal to the SQL standard and of a concrete patch to PostgreSQL. Along the way we had many false starts and bad ideas, Joel ended up joining the SQL committee and hosting an ISO meeting, more people joined forces to help us and the feature grew into something quite different, and in our opinion something much more useful.
