Comment by weitendorf

Sounds a lot like Spark before it became so enterprise-focused. Back in my day we wrote scala to run our queries, and once we figured out how to get our compiler and runtime set up, we liked it!

I’ve been getting into Postgres recently and I was very surprised how easy it is to introduce new types/operators/etc through C code. I’m not talking about domains. Just write some C and you can have whatever type you want. It really demystified “extensions” for me, I actually think that is an actively harmful name (it sounds clunky, gross, based on my experience dealing with “extension” and “plugins” elsewhere) for what is essentially just custom types/functions. More people should try writing their own postgres extensions. It’s not very difficult at all!

I’ve been cooking in this space for quite a while (HDFS/spark, Apache Pinot, proprietary stuff, an experimental functional ORM over SQLite). The biggest problem, I think, is the interface between the management/admin, application, and “query” layers. I think something like grpc/protoc (or indeed the way Spark used the JVM) is needed to provide non-leaky abstractions and more programmatic/structured interfaces from the DB to its clients. Happy to share more, but basically, the database needs to become capable of general (meta-)parsing with a reflective type system, I think.