I’ve had a number of conversations recently that have highlighted to me how not understanding people’s assumptions can really hamper conversations. I’m going to highlight questions from two recent conversations, one was with a VC and the other was from a grant for which we applied. My biggest frustration in all this is that how wrong assumptions on both parties prevented deals from moving forward. I assumed that the other parties understood what I understood about SQL, which was wrong. The other parties’ assumptions about what you couldn’t do with SQL led them to assume other things about DataDistillr that was also wrong. In any event, it was the assumptions that bit us both.
Today’s SQL is not What You Learned in 1996
We applied for a US Government grant which unfortunately we did not win. The feedback seemed to center around whether or not SQL was capable of dealing with multi-dimensional data. The reviewers seemed to think that this was not possible and would be extremely difficult. Here’s where the assumptions hurt. I assumed that the reviewer would know that modern SQL tools already support multidimensional data structures. The reviewer assumed the opposite based on their understanding of SQL. It was a lesson learned for me in that I should have put more explanatory language explaining current state. I wish however, that we could have spoken with the reviewer and explained this.
Yes, SQL Supports Nested Data
Unfortunately, SQL hasn’t coalesced around a solid standard for this, but many SQL based systems such as Drill, Spark, Presto, Postgres, MySQL and many others support querying nested data using SQL.
