SQL window functions

SQL's window functions are such a huge topic that some see them as a DSL inside SQL itself.

You can do amazing things in sql without window functions, but when you need sophisticated rankings, or sorting subgroups, or you feel you are struggling with `group by + having + order by`, window functions are usually the answer.

 To me, Bruce Momjian's talk about window functions has been my default resource whenever I need a refresher.

But today I found a teaser of a book on window functions that's coming that looks very very good. I'll keep an eye on this page.  Also, the pic is from that site, so it deserves a link from my high-traffic blog (you're welcome).

Duckdb news and posts, early 2023

Motherduck is lately increasing their activity on the net, and they recently published a couple of interesting blogposts:

One, with the provocative-cliche of "Big Data is dead", which had quite a bit of traction in HN, and the other, a guest post, much more practical and "fun": "solving aoc with duckdb".

If you follow what happens in duckdbland, you'll know that the duckcon happened during FOSDEM2023. Here are the videos. 

One of the talks (not in duckcon, but in FOSDEM), talks about pytohn+duckdb. It's very nice to be able to use pandas dataframes from duckdb with the 0 copy approach.

Another talk is about duckdb extensions. Very DWIM, and in general, the practical approach the team has is quite refreshing.  Unfortunately, I don't do C++, so writing extensions is out of my league.  But I started thinking what would it take to be able to write extensions in Lua(JIT?).  Probably a low level wizard could make it happen quite fast. But performance wise... no idea.

Also, the biggest news: DuckDB 0.7.0 is out!