CrateDB Blog | Development, integrations, IoT, & more

CrateDB adds support for JOINs & Geo shapes at DockerCon 15

Written by CrateDB | 2015-11-16

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and takes a whole lot of steps to get where we know we want to go to.

At Crate.io our goal is to give everyone a linear scalable SQL database, with full text search and no-config operations to everyone who is trying to escape the single server database design, and still be able to use the SQL language that everyone is familiar with.

Today we've taken two huge steps forward in our journey by releasing support for table joins, which was our number one feature request from our community, and support for Geo Shapes in our newest testing release (0.53.0) which can be downloaded from https://github.com/crate/crate/releases

This release includes support for JOINS (with some limitations), which means it supports queries like:

SELECT articles.NAME AS article, 
       colors.NAME AS color, 
       price 
FROM   articles CROSS  
JOIN   colors  
WHERE  price 5000.0 ORDER BY price, color, article

Or:

SELECT articles.NAME AS article, 
       colors.NAME AS color, 
       price 
FROM   articles, 
       colors 
WHERE  price 5000.0 ORDER BY price, color, article

The next step will take our current work and expand it to support all types of joins, which we expect to release soon-- we're wrangling the laws of physics and pushing what's possible forward to support what was previously thought impossible, support for high performance joins on massive datasets.

This release also supports for Geo Shapes. Querying them makes it possible to query for records that only occur in a geographical defined boundary, say "all the weather and rain data in San Francisco". For example if you want to know in which shapes a point is contained or which shapes are intersected by a given path our geo implementation does its work. With the support of GeoJSON we got a powerful format on board that relies on a wide spread standard and contains rich data types.

We're super excited and grateful to be on this journey with you-- let us know your experiences with these new features!