Ian works for the MariaDB Foundation, mostly assisting with the documentation for MariaDB. He wrote the first online grocery store in South Africa, back in the 90's, in Perl (after deciding not to use the new-fangled Python!) and MySQL. He has taught Unisa IS courses, written and taught web development courses, and while head of IT for a large media company, wrote the book Mastering MySQL in 2003. He founded and developed the IT infrastructure for an online organic food business, in PHP and MySQL.
He's also a passionate Wikimedian, and is on the board of Wikimedia ZA.
Accepted Talks:
MariaDB 10.2 is the current stable release, and MariaDB 10.3 the current development release. This talk introduces some of the new features that may be of interest to Python developers, in particular Window Functions and Common Table Expressions (CTEs). Window functions are similar to aggregate functions in that they perform calculations across a set of rows. Recursive CTEs are excellent for navigating a tree structure, or a route map, which regular SQL is poor at.
By making use of these features. more work can be passed on to the database layer, simplifying the code and improving performance.
