Charles Tirrell

Date: Jul. 07, 2010

The applications for HTSQL can be easily seen in business and research contexts.  However, the need for data and the ability to query data in a ubiquitous manner is not limited to these domains.  Here is a short narrative showcasing how HTSQL can sometimes help in unlikely times and places. 

A week ago, I was relaxing at the beach house with a couple of friends enjoying a nice summer barbecue.  While grilling some burgers, we were listening to some first wave ska tunes.

As we sat down to enjoy our grilled foods, over the stereo came the song "Israelites" by Desmond Dekker and a discussion broke out about old school first-wave ska.  I mentioned that the world of music changed when Desmond Dekker had his first release with the album of the same name.  My friend smugly leaned over and said "Not so fast".  He explained to me that Dekker had an earlier release a few years prior to "Israelites", however he couldn't recall the name of it.

A passionate discussion ensued and neither of us could be convinced otherwise.  We quickly jumped into the web using our smartphones and tried to find information on Dekker's early releases via the typical sources of music knowledge; itunes, Wikipedia, Pandora, etc.  Unfortunately, we found a bunch of conflicting information and couldn't solve our dilemma.

I remembered that Prometheus had HTSQL running on the MusicBrainz recorded music database.  So I hopped onto our demo site and did a quick search for Desmond Dekker.

http://musicdemo.htsql.com/artist?name~'desmond'&name~'dekker'

This query brought up not only Desmond Dekker and the Aces, but his work with his other groups.  At this point we wanted to join these findings to releases.  So we queried the release table with a join on artist through album.

http://musicdemo.htsql.com/release?album.artist.name~'desmond'&album.artist.name~'dekker'

Since the release table didn't give us all the information regarding album name and label name, we added it to our columns to returns.  At this point, we needed to combine information from four tables; release, label, album and artist.  This would be a real hefty query in SQL, but HTSQL made it really easy to do.

http://musicdemo.htsql.com/release{album.name,album.artist.name,releasedate,label.name}? album.artist.name~'desmond'&album.artist.name~'dekker'

The final step was to sort this list of releases in ascending order by release date, so the first release was at the very top.  By simply adding a "+", we were able to sort our results set.

http://musicdemo.htsql.com/release{album.name,album.artist.name,releasedate+,label.name}? album.artist.name~'desmond'&album.artist.name~'dekker'

Lo and behold, we easily found that Desmond Dekker's first release was not "Israelites."  It was "Madgie / Honour Your Mother & Father," released by Island Records in 1963, three years earlier.  I was proven wrong, my friend's memory was vindicated and he was overjoyed that he was proved right in the end.  Hopefully, next time HTSQL can help me win a debate!

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