Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ SQL: The Universal Solvent for REST APIs

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This is an article touting a product called Steampipe, but ignore that. The value here is the really lucid account of structured query language (SQL), the specification widely used to retrieve data from databases. Jon Udell argues that the app is great because it converts API calls to SQL tables. Treating remote applications using the same logic you would use to work with a database is maybe a good idea (though keep in mind that a single API call that returns data in JSON will require multiple tables). Understanding what's going on is what's interesting here, and that's what the description of SQL makes easy. It helps the reader see how data is piped from one query to the next to the next to do complex things, not just in SQL but in more advanced tools like Pandas.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Nov 23, 2024 2:34 p.m.

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