Is being lazy a good reason to learn SQL? Dimitri Fontaine and Vik Fearing join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss whether every data problem can be (or should be) solved in SQL. Have you tried to solve all the Advent of Code puzzles with SQL? Or written a book for application developers about The Art of PostgreSQL? Or tried to solve a murder mystery by running SQL queries? Regardless of whether you pronounce SQL as “sequel” or as “ess-cue-ell”, getting skilled at SQL is like going to the gym for exercise. It’s ideal to do it every day to build up your strength. Also, this episode includes an explanation of what a “declarative” language like SQL is—plus a fun segue into time zones.

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode, in the order they were covered:

• Dimitri Fontaine’s blog: https://tapoueh.org/ 
• Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com/
• Dimitri’s book, The Art of PostgreSQL: https://theartofpostgresql.com/ 
• Blog post about What’s new in SQL:2023: https://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new
• PostgreSQL Exercises at pgexercises.com: https://pgexercises.com/
• SQL Murder Mystery for learning SQL: https://mystery.knightlab.com/
• Pgvector extension for Postgres and AI embeddings: https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector
• Vik’s Advent of Code puzzle solutions in SQL on GitHub: https://github.com/xocolatl/advent-of-code
• Stack Overflow data in Postgres, from pgtreats GitHub repo: https://github.com/pgtreats/stackoverflow_in_pg
• OpenStreetMap runs on Postgres: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/38.01/-95.84
• Uber data set: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/uber-tlc-foil-response
• Ideas for fun, open data sets: https://data.world/data-society?entryTypeLabel=dataset&tab=resources
• “Don’t Do This” Timestamp learnings on PostgreSQL wiki: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don't_Do_This#Don.27t_use_timestamp_.28without_time_zone.29