jOOQ Newsletter: December 30, 2013. Happy New Year!

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Tweet of the Day

We would like to contribute this new section of the newsletter to our followers, users, and customers. Here’s Andy Van Den Heuvel, who appreciates jOOQ’s and MyBatis’ (both being ”post-JPA” frameworks) return to SQL.

More SQL-centric alternatives e.g. MyBatis or jOOQ (both being “post-JPA” frameworks) indicates a certain need to get closer to SQL again.—
Andy Van Den Heuvel (@andyvdh7) December 27, 2013

2013 from jOOQ’s perspective

2013 was a very exciting year for jOOQ and jOOQ customers. Not only did we create a company to offer commercial licensing and support, but we have also released the awesome jOOQ 3.0 major release, which brought row-level typesafety to SQL in Java. No competitor product on the market currently lifts SQL to be a first-class citizen in Java as we do. In other words, 2013 was a great year for Java and SQL in general.

After 3.0, great minor releases followed suit:

• jOOQ 3.1 with support for MariaDB, SQL Server 2012, Oracle 12c, and a new sophisticated SPI to interact with POJO mapping
• jOOQ 3.2 with new SPIs to interact with record and query rendering lifecycles for advanced SQL transformation. We also introduced a new matcher strategy to allow for fine-grained control over jOOQ’s code generation.

And 2014 won’t be less exciting, as we’re adding support for another popular commercial database: MS Access, besides being the first and only SQL abstraction framework to implement keyset paging in such an intuitive syntax.

In that sense, let us wish you a Happy New Year and a great start to 2014!

Convince Your Manager

It is easy for technical folks like software developers and architects to understand why jOOQ adds value to your projects. You’re the workers and as such, you need the right tools. While there are free alternatives (like Gimp), you’re a database professional who prefers to use the market leader (like Photoshop).

But the market leader costs money and your manager needs to be convinced that the money is spent wisely. No problem we told ourselves, and created this simple presentation that can help you convince your managers:

The above presentation compares jOOQ with the industry standard means of accessing RDBMS:

• JDBC (low-level)
• JPA (high-level)

This comparison will then be used to explain the return on investment (ROI) that your team will get by using jOOQ.

Upcoming Events

After another welcoming and interesting talk at the JUGS in Berne, we are happy to announce that our talk will now also be hosted in Hamburg, in January 2014:

Here is an overview of our upcoming events

• January 14, 2014: JUG-HH in Hamburg (German)
• January 23, 2014: Rhein JUG in Düsseldorf (German)
• January 27, 2014: JUGM in Munich (German)

Stay informed about 2014 events on www.jooq.org/news.

SQL Zone – LATERAL joins

Few people may be aware of the SQL:1999 standard LATERAL keyword, which can be applied to table expressions in the FROM clause, in order to allow them to cross-reference other tables within the same FROM clause. This is extremely useful when joining non-scalar table-valued functions to each record of physical tables.

T-SQL (SQL Server and Sybase) users have known this feature for a long time under the vendor-specific CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY join keywords. With the recent releases of PostgreSQL 9.3 and Oracle 12c, other databases can now finally also profit from this SQL goodie.

Read more about LATERAL joins and how this will be supported in jOOQ 3.3 in our blog post.