Federico-Razzoli.com UPDATEs 2020.13

Newsletter sent on 29th June 2020

Good Monday morning from London, Europe.

You may notice that Federico-Razzoli.com UPDATEs format is still evolving, a change that started last week. Now you can find a weekly commentary from me. It’s not necessarily about the most important news of the week: in this case that would be the release of MariaDB 10.5 GA, not the beginning of works for Perl 7. But I felt I had something more important to say about the choices that have been made by Perl developers, and I preferred to talk about that.

Also, note that since next week Federico-Razzoli.com UPDATEs will be sent on Friday or Saturday. I feel it makes sense for this new rich format, because it has a lot of news and in-depth contents that you may want to read during the weekend. For quick news, it’s better to subscribe my Telegram channel: open_source_databases.

Federico-Razzoli.com contents

  • Cloud Computing cost reduction, a Live conversation with Renato Losio – I will have this conversation today at 3pm London time. Attend live to tell us your opinion and ask questions via the YouTube chat.
  • Do languages need NULL? – Rust example – You may remember that I’ve criticised SQL NULL in some articles. At the same time, I’ve also admitted that sometimes it’s useful or necessary (though technically you could do anything without it, on any DBMS). Here I talk about a language that, in my opinion, implements NULL functionality in a great way, without actually implementing NULL: Rust!

Events

Most relevant events I am aware about:

Articles from the web

Commentary of the week

Perl 7 works have been announced. It shouldn’t implement relevant changes, it will just disable bad practices by default. They say that existing code should still work “if it’s not a mess”.

Allow me some considerations. First, this is almost never true. Incompatible changes to interpreted languages are a problem, because you need to modify existing code or not upgrade the interpreter, and I don’t need to explain why both the options could be a pain. Second, they must have spent a lot of resources to develop some feature, and now they tell you that if you use them your code is a mess. And note how some of them are purely a matter of syntax text (new Object vs Object->new… really??). This is a pity, because Perl was traditionally the most conservative language I know.

A final consideration is that Perl 6 is official another language now. It is a parenthesis in Perl versioning. It changed its name, it’s now Raku. I’m not aware of production uses of Raku, but it seems to be quite interesting.

MySQL ecosystem

Valerii has written the his last release of Fun with Bugs. For 7 years he did a great job keeping the community informed about the most relevant MySQL bugs, and pushing Oracle to manage bugs properly where they needed to be pushed. His decision is bad news for the community. Please join me in writing a thank you message.

PostgreSQL

Other databases

Misc technical contents

IT & Database strategies

Business

About me

If you like my contents, my talks/webinars, my books and Federico-Razzoli.com UPDATEs, you may want to check my professional services. You may want to try a database health check or training, and then decide if you’d like to start a long term collaboration. If you can’t make this kind of decisions, please consider endorsing me with your manager.

You may also want to follow the open_source_databases Telegram channel. Links about the open source database world, every day.

Enjoy these UPDATEs!
Federico Razzoli

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