Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Markus Winand. I live in Vienna with my wife and 5-year-old son. I make my living as an independent trainer and consultant.

Have you enjoyed previous pgconf.eu or FOSDEM conferences, either as attendee or as speaker?

I have attended and spoke at both in the past. I find huge technological diversity of FOSDEM very interesting. Databases is just one of many topics you can see there and I encourage everyone to have a look at other devrooms too.

What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

I’ll talk about “Standard SQL features where PostgreSQL beats its competitors”.

The reason for this topic is that I suffer tremendously from the different SQL dialects out there. I guess this problem hits me very hard, because I work with many different databases. But I’ve also seen that many developers have problems finding the right syntax for their product. Just have a look at the SQL questions on stack overflow.com to see what I mean.

On the other hand, there is an international SQL standard that is supposed to define the one-and-only SQL language. Unfortunately, many vendors don’t follow the standard but prefer to make their own syntax. PostgreSQL is a big exception here: it follows the standard as far as possible, yet it provides proprietary extensions without breaking standard conformance.

Having that said, my talk serves two purposes: (1) teach some cool SQL to PostgreSQL users; (2) highlight how poor other vendors are doing—competition is good for everyone, isn’t it ;)

What is the audience for your talk?

The talk is for developers using SQL.

What existing knowledge should the attendee have?

Basic SQL know-how is enough.