Alexander Ioffe
Senior Software Engineer at Nasdaq
With the right toolset, an impossible problem can become solvable, and with the right abstraction, the inscrutable comes within reach. Examples of these things are Calculus, Polar Coordinates, and the Rosetta Stone. Programming languages are a human construct made to solve a particular problem, but their true power comes from their faithfulness to higher mathematics.
I love SQL because it gives me the power to talk to virtually any datastore and I love Objects because they give me the ability to reason about any discrete thing. However, it is only within the union of Functional Programming, that both of them can live together in harmony; the promises of category theory ensure it.
This is exemplified by the Quill framework of which I am a maintainer, and that I have used to build traditional database applications, as well as formidable ETL and Big-Data pipelines for the Financial Sector.
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Past presentations
There is no protection against bad queries. If a query is poorly written, it's execution can't be improved with any indexes, fast access path or other database advancements. What is the most common source of poorly written queries? Most of the time they do not come from humans; they are generated by applications that use ORMs to communicate with databases. What can we do to prevent it from happ...
If there is one thing that can be learned from a generation of ORM frameworks, it is that treating a database like a fancy hashtable does not work, yet this is exactly what most entity-managers will do! In a proverbial sense, one can imagine that the problems of impedance mismatch are akin to those experienced when taking a Commanche helicopter and racing it around a Formula-1 race track agains...
SQL Queries can get large, really, really large. Typically this complexity is attacked using stacked SQL views or ORM frameworks like Hibernate, which both have major limitations. SQL itself has no objects so constructs more abstract than a View are unavailable, making programming graces like polymorphism all but a dream. ORM, on the other hand, comes at the cost of notorious impedance mismatch...
Jul 19 2019