The reason why I like Unicode a lot is because it allows me to code in text based environments and still have nice output. Today, we’re going to play with Regional Indicator Symbol, which is implemented as a Unicode combinaison of letters from 🇦 to 🇿. For instance, if you display 🇫 then 🇷 concatenated together, you get 🇫🇷. Let’s try that from our PostgreSQL prompt!
The modern calendar is a trap for the young engineer’s mind. We deal with the calendar on a daily basis and until exposed to its insanity it’s rather common to think that calendar based computations are easy. That’s until you’ve tried to do it once. A very good read about how the current calendar came to be the way it is now is Erik’s Naggum The Long, Painful History of Time.
Business logic is supposed to be the part of the application where you deal with customer or user facing decisions and computations. It is often argued that this part should be well separated from the rest of the technical infrastructure of your code. Of course, SQL and relational database design is meant to support your business cases (or user stories), so then we can ask ourselves if SQL should be part of your business logic implementation. Or actually, how much of your business logic should be SQL?
Sometimes you need to dive in an existing data set that you know very little about. Let’s say we’ve been lucky to have had a high level description of the business case covered by a database, and then access to it. Our next step is figuring out data organisation, content and quality. Our tool box: the world’s most advanced open source database, PostgreSQL, and its Structured Query Language, SQL.
Kris Jenkins cooked up a very nice way
to embed SQL in your
code: YeSQL for Clojure. The main
idea is that you should be writing your SQL queries in .sql files in your
code repository and maintain them there.
The idea is very good and it is now possible to find alternative implementations of the Clojure yesql library in other languages. Today, we are going to have a look at one of them for the python programming language: anosql.
