Morel is now in Rust! I just made the first release of the new Rust toolchain for Morel. Morel-Rust implements same language as Morel-Java. It's early days, but potentially performance will be much better. blog.hydromatic.net/2025/10/23/m...

I think I have found a way to remove aggregate functions from Morel. They become ordinary functions applied to the collection of elements gathered by the "group" operator (or a query on those elements if you want to pre-filter). github.com/hydromatic/m...

How we simplified the syntax of Morel's "order" step blog.hydromatic.net/2025/06/20/s...

I'm pleased to announce release 0.7 of Morel! This is a huge release, adding support for ordered/unordered data, set operators, and revised order syntax. A major rework of Morel's type inference algorithm delivered function overloading. blog.hydromatic.net/2025/06/08/m...

Database tables are unordered, but functional programming languages work best over ordered lists. Which should Morel prefer? Both! We now have "list" and "bag" types, and full relational algebra over both. blog.hydromatic.net/2025/06/06/o...

Be honest, did you ever find a real-world use for SQL's "INTERSECT ALL" operator? Now we did! This post explains how you can use Morel's "intersect" to compute GCD (greatest common divisor). blog.hydromatic.net/2025/06/03/i...

Am I the only one who uses this git trick? To split a commit (in this case a8aee880), include it twice in the rebase script with a b (break) step in the middle. When rebase pauses, revert the parts of the commit that you don't want. They will be applied in the next commit.

Is it possible to do serious programming (such as solving Wordle) in a query language? If not, what's missing? The video of my DataCouncil talk is posted. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwFs...

OK, I merged ordered/unordered queries. Next, an "unorder" step and an "ordinal" expression, so that you can more easily convert between lists and bags.

I'm getting ready to merge a big new feature to Morel - ability to query unordered data sets (bags, and database tables), ordered data sets (lists), and hybrid queries that mix the two. I'd appreciate feedback on whether the specification is clear. github.com/hydromatic/m...

I started a discussion about supporting SQL Pipe syntax in Apache Calcite. Please chime in. lists.apache.org/thread/1ggd3...

Should Morel be rewritten in Rust? The Rust data community is compelling, but moving to Rust might cause us to lose focus on Morel's bigger goals. I ponder the question in a blog post. blog.hydromatic.net/2025/05/11/r...

I'm pleased to announce release 0.6 of Morel, just 2 months after 0.5. The release adds 'forall', 'exists' and 'implies' keywords for logic programming, 'with' for easy record updates, and a tabular output mode to the shell. blog.hydromatic.net/2025/05/02/m...

This query is supposed to find all employees in dept 10 who earn more than all programmers in dept 20, but it has a bug. The bug is caused by a fatal flaw in SQL. What is that flaw, and how does Morel fix it? (The answer is in my talk with @julien.ledem.net, youtu.be/zpdbEvhhne8#...)

"More than Query - Future Directions of Query Languages, from SQL to Morel", a conversation with @julien.ledem.net about Morel, based on the talk I gave at Data Council 2025. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpdb...

Announcing Quidem release 0.12! A query recorder, multi-line strings in "!set" commands, and upgraded dependencies. github.com/hydromatic/q...

Thanks to all who came to the talk, and the great questions afterwards. As always at Data Council, the hallway conversations are interesting and inspiring. Here are my slides. (For best results, click 'download raw file', and then open the PDF.) github.com/julianhyde/s...

Tomorrow at Data Council I'll talk about how to solve optimization problems in Morel. If banana cakes sell for $4, chocolate cakes sell for $4.50, and you have a certain amount of ingredients, how many of each kind of cake do you make to maximize profit?

Who's in Oakland this week for Data Council?

Until last week, I hadn’t thought much about DML in Morel. I assumed that we would just add commands analogous to SQL’s INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE commands. But I devised some language extensions that I think fit Morel and modern data engineering workflow better. blog.hydromatic.net/2025/04/14/d...

I've created a VSCode plugin for Morel. Very basic at this point, but I'd welcome any improvements. github.com/hydromatic/v...

Wordle 1,370 6/6* 🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜ ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Ugh

We’ve been wrong about the shape of the universe. www.scientificamerican.com/article/froz...

When you start a project (say Maven or Gradle) do you start minimal and add enforcers (linters, code formatting, code coverage) later? Or enable all the enforcers on day one? Feel like I'm a grumpy old man saying "If you won't take your shoes off I don't want you in my house".

In Morel you can browse the type system, and create data frames from the files in it, as if it were statically typed. What's the trick? Progressive types. blog.hydromatic.net/2023/12/31/f...

Verbose descriptions for boolean methods bug me. I'd just write 'Returns whether the driver should stop.' We don't enumerate every possible return value for any other data type.

I am pleased to announce release 0.5 of Morel, 14 months after release 0.4. There are several syntax extensions to make the language more powerful and convenient, including 'into', 'through' and 'distinct'. blog.hydromatic.net/2025/03/04/m...

Today was my last day at Google. It's time to create something new. In the next few months, I intend to evolve the Morel language, realize the SQL semantic layer, improve Calcite, and play more Beethoven piano sonatas! Read the blog post: blog.hydromatic.net/2025/03/03/i...

If I upload an image that captures a block of text, the alt text should just be the text. Or am I missing something?

The father of relational databases understood semantic data models.

I'm adding existential and universal quantifiers, and constrained types, to Morel and would love to hear what people think of the syntax. Is 'check' the right keyword to follow 'forall'? 'exists' and 'implies' are also new keywords.

So, Jeff, let’s get this straight. You think the internet isn’t already full of “personal liberties and free markets” opinions? Next you’re going to tell me you just discovered Ayn Rand and, no really, you should read her, she really gets it.

I canceled my Washington Post subscription today. Regretfully, we’re now a NYT household. I feel sorry for the many good journalists at WaPo. I love your work. The problem is, your owner is a dick.

Every couple of years I have to upgrade or fix Jekyll, which brings me into contact with Ruby, gems, bundler and rvm. Several hours later I am doubting my sanity, and pledging never to touch Jekyll again.

How to create data frames in a statically typed language? Morel's answer is progressive typing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uybU...

For some reason we all stopped doing meetups for a few years. Let's fix that. See you in Santa Clara on Thursday. www.meetup.com/futureofdata...

This excellent post identifies some huge flaws in a "study" by the MRC which doesn't interrogate why right-wing sources like OANN and Newsmax are deprecated (not banned) as sources on Wikipedia, and ignored right-leaning sources that are considered reliable and are widely used.

"In the future, terminals will be so wide that we won't have to worry about line length" We'll have flying cars before that one comes true. In the mean time, let's start teaching coders how to split lines for legibility.

I’m spending a lot of time reading about overloading. If Morel queries are to accept both lists and bags, and simple queries with only lists are ordered, type derivation gets complicated. The solution may be an internal “join” function overloaded for lists and bags. dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

I just spent a couple of days rebasing an incomplete PR that I wrote in a couple of hours last year.

Introducing the “Cheese Jar”. Now I can keep my Taleggio or Gorgonzola in the fridge, and let it sit on the counter for an hour before lunch coming to room temperature, without repulsing the family. Consider it my contribution to western civilization.

Number one design goal of a cereal bowl: 16 of them (family of 4 for 4 days) fit easily in the upper rack of a dishwasher. Also important: holds breakfast cereal.

Outlier AI. You are doing it wrong. Hiring people to post completely nonsenese or copy&pasted issues in reputable open-source repositories - and make maintainers train your AI on it ? not good. There are 50 such issues in last few days in @airflow repo [1] and counting. More details in [2] […]

Wordle 1,316 3/6* ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 🟩🟩⬜🟩⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Today’s word is an English food, yesterday’s was a French food, and both derive from the same Latin word.

Spotify just hit me with a 'sponsored recommendation'. They used to call that 'payola'. If my monthly fee isn't good enough for them maybe I should go elsewhere.

I've been using git since 2012 and I still don't understand what the index is or why it is called 'index'.

"Truly open source"

It’s fun to write your own implementation of a classic algorithm. Over the weekend I implemented union-find (packaging it as a Java Map whose keys can be merged into equivalence sets). github.com/hydromatic/m...

#WashingtonPost #Bezos #JeffBezos #Amazon #Cartoonist #AnnTelnaes #Zuckerberg #MarkZuckerberg #Meta #Facebook #Altman #SamAltman #OpenAI #OkloInc #HelionEnergy #Soon-Shiong #SoonShiong #LATimes #Oncologist Democracy can't function without a free press. Abridged (shortened) article thread ⏬ 3 min

Working on lists, relations and ordering in Morel has got me thinking about the information content of collections. We generally assume that data structures for various types of collections (sets, ordered sets, multisets, lists) use similar amounts of memory (plus a little overhead for hash /