Last week Matheus Alcantara (Senior SDE), and Euler Taveira (Principal Engineer), attended the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32/WG3 meeting held at the ABNT (Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas) in São Paulo, Brazil, as guests. Joining them remotely was Peter Eisentraut, EDB’s VP and Chief Architect, who has brought his expertise to the SQL Standards Committee since 2020.
ISO working groups such as this one, allow guests to attend by invitation. Peter, for instance, previously joined the C programming language committee as a guest. Under current rules, this "invited guest" status is limited to a maximum of two appearances. Peter actually introduced one of the current permanent members years ago, and it is common practice for members to invite their own colleagues. Currently, Matheus is looking beyond a guest role and is seriously pursuing a permanent position on the Committee.
The committee and their guests, Euler and Matheus, on the far left
Like "Commitfest", but for SQL Standards
Matheus described the meeting quite similar to his experience of contributing to PostgreSQL. “The meeting is mostly people presenting papers to propose changes for the SQL standard, then the group discusses said changes, adding comments to the doc that need to be addressed with a follow-up paper. Unless it’s straight-away approved or rejected.” Euler adds: “Similar to PostgreSQL, there are some papers that fix bugs (wrong references, for example), clarify a conforming rule, or fix a presentation issue, just to cite some cases.”
“Papers are like patches that we send to Postgres mailing list, and the meeting is like an in-person commitfest”, says Matheus. He even proposed a fix for a small issue with a typo on a text link. While Matheus never imagined being part of a SQL Standards meeting, he was keen to learn how the process works, and how to get proposal changes from Postgres to Standard, and vice versa.
Euler joined the meeting in São Paulo because he was curious about the process behind the Standard since he read Jim Melton's paper about SQL:1999 changes. It was a happy coincidence that Euler had just listened to Peter Eisentraut talk about the new proposals that will land in the next SQL standard version, when he found out the next in-person meeting was going to be in Brazil. “I asked Peter for an invitation and it was a great experience!”
The Committee at work, with the remote participants on the screen
Euler was seriously impressed about the many changes the committee was able to discuss in just 1 week. Some proposals had such a quick turnaround in terms of incorporating feedback, its next iteration could be discussed in the same week still. Matheus was in awe with the committee members knowing “almost all the SQL standard pages by memory”. If he could go back in time he says he would have studied the standards documents in more detail.
Euler felt prepared going in, since Peter had explained the process before. “And whenever steps were unclear, the committee members kindly explained them.” Euler thinks that “just” attending the first meeting was the best strategy for him to learn about the work involved.
What’s next?
Two months from now, at the PostgreSQL Development Conference (PGConf.dev), Peter Eisentraut will lead a hands-on workshop designed to demystify the SQL standard. Participants will learn how to interpret complex specifications and to draft change proposals. He’s looking to empower the PostgreSQL community to create change proposals that he can champion at the June Committee meeting in Stockholm.