2020 Holiday Greetings
K.S. Bhaskar
We wish you and yours a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Joyous Kwanzaa, Bright Karthigai – whatever you choose to celebrate this holiday season – and a Happy New Year. We hope all is well with you and yours, and that 2021 brings more sanity than 2020 did.
YottaDB moved to 100% telecommuting in mid-March, and we have been working remotely since then. We anticipate returning to the office after the pandemic; meanwhile, the office is for computers and the occasional cobweb.
Nevertheless, we have been busy this year. Our major milestone was the release of Octo 1.0, for querying YottaDB databases using SQL-92 and JDBC. Our next major target for Octo is read-write capability using SQL. Although the following is very much code that is under development, this demonstration of INSERT INTO will give you a taste of what we plan to release in 2021:
$ echo "create table usstates(state varchar primary key, capital varchar);" | octo
OCTO> create table usstates(state varchar primary key, capital varchar);
OCTO>
$ echo "create table uspresidents (id integer primary key, firstname varchar, middlename varchar, lastname varchar)" | octo
OCTO> create table uspresidents (id integer primary key, firstname varchar, middlename varchar, lastname varchar)
OCTO>
$ head -3 ~/.yottadb/usstates.sql
INSERT into USSTATES values
("Alabama", "Montgomery"),
("Alaska", "Juneau"),
$ head -3 ~/.yottadb/uspresidents.sql
INSERT into USPRESIDENTS values
(1, "George", "", "Washington"),
(2, "John", "", "Adams"),
$ octo -f ~/.yottadb/usstates.sql
$ octo -f ~/.yottadb/uspresidents.sql
$ echo "select state, capital, id, firstname, middlename, lastname from uspresidents, usstates where lastname = state or lastname = capital;" | octo
OCTO> select state, capital, id, firstname, middlename, lastname from uspresidents, usstates where lastname = state or lastname = capital;
Washington|Olympia|1|George||Washington
Wisconsin|Madison|4|James||Madison
Mississippi|Jackson|7|Andrew||Jackson
Nebraska|Lincoln|16|Abraham||Lincoln
OCTO>
$
Along with a number of other enhancements and fixes, in our mission to make YottaDB a language-agnostic database, we added support for Rust this year, adding to our support for C, Go and M. From our community, we have support for access to the database from Perl (thanks, Stefan Traby!), and wrappers for access from node.js (thanks, David Wicksell!) and Python (thanks, Peter Goss!) are being worked on by community members. We continue to merge upstream code releases into the YottaDB code base, while ensuring that the merged code meets the standards for robustness, performance, and security that you have come to expect from us.
Since all our software is developed as a 100% free / open source project, you can follow our work at https://gitlab.com/YottaDB. You can see what our development plans are, and you can even see our review comments on our developers’ code Merge Requests. Please do feel free to add your comments to any Issue or Merge Request.
YottaDB continues to grow. We have grown organically from the original three founders to a team of ten. In 2020, we had a table at an international event, FOSDEM 2020, in Brussels. We had more visitors there than all our events in the US in 2019 combined, but after that the pandemic shut down our in-person events. We hope to resume them in due course of time. In 2020, we also refreshed our web site, and we had additional users who permitted us to feature them on our web site.
We send you our hopes and best wishes for good health, happiness and every success in 2021, and hope that we have an opportunity to meet in person in the not too distant future.
Published on December 24, 2020