Where is SQL ? #JoelKallmanDay

I didn't plan to write something this year for the JoelKallmanDay, a day that encourages IT folks to blog, initiated by the oracle community, and named as an homage to Joel Kallman who was an inspiration by his devotion to the APEX developer's community, and his unforgettable smart attitude, always open to listen and help. When I met Joel physically, at a speakers' dinner, I was excited to sit alongside a guru, and, as soon as he talked and listened to me, he immediately reversed the roles. I'll never forget that. Joel was like that: talking and listening to you like you are the most important person in the discussion.

Today, I was thinking about the developer community, and listening to users, and had something to share about this, so this is the greatest occasion. Let me explain why. I arrived this morning at #Devoxx Belgium. Devoxx is one of the largest community-driven conferences for developers. I'll run a live demo of YugabyteDB on AWS EKS (managed kubernetes) tomorrow. I'm really happy to see some attraction for new databases in developer's conferences (I had two talks about Distributed SQL last week at Devoxx Morocco, and many interesting discussions). When entering the Devoxx venue in Antwerp, I did a quick tour of the exhibition hall to look at which DB is represented there. I've seen: MongoDB, Neo4j, QuestDB, Redis. And I got a coffee at the AWS “Servelesspresso” booth, discussing databases: was all about DynamoDB. That's all. All those are #NoSQL databases!

Then I'm realizing that if I were a junior developer starting in IT and attending this developer conference, I would probably think that SQL databases disappeared sometime along with the dinosaurs.

I'm leaving this there for thoughts. I've written A lesson from NoSQL (vs. RDBMS): listen to your users two years ago when I was still a consultant, where I recognize that something that MongoDB did very well, as well as DynamoDB, is setting the highest priority to the developer experience. The SQL databases community is convinced that SQL is there to stay, and there are many technical facts behind that. But repeating this, again and again, at database conferences, to a crowd already convinced about it, will not help to make SQL popular again. As a developer advocate for YugabyteDB, I go to all conferences, developer, devops, database, cloud, and talk about Distributed SQL. But, that's not sufficient. SQL is absent from the developer's conference exhibition hall, and that's a problem for its longevity. All database vendors should be there, giving colorful socks, serving smoothies, and demonstrating their developer-friendly tools and APIs.