SQL has been extremely successful as the de facto standard language for working with data. Virtually all mainstream database-like systems use SQL as their primary query language. But SQL is an old language with significant design problems, making it difficult to learn, difficult to use, and difficult to extend. Many have observed these challenges with SQL, and proposed solutions involving new languages. New language adoption is a significant obstacle for users, and none of the potential replacements have been successful enough to displace SQL. In GoogleSQL, we've taken a different approach - solving SQL's problems by extending SQL. Inspired by a pattern that works well in other modern data languages, we added piped data flow syntax to SQL. The results are transformative - SQL becomes a flexible language that's easier to learn, use and extend, while still leveraging the existing SQL ecosystem and existing userbase. Improving SQL from within allows incrementally adopting new features, without migrations and without learning a new language, making this a more productive approach to improve on standard SQL.

In future buildings, all devices will be connected directly to the Internet, surrounding people with a Web of Things. That will bring the amazing possibility to control building facilities from any device with Internet access (PC, mobile phone, etc.). However, while it is already technically possible to connect devices directly to IP networks, most of home and building automation systems still use non-IP field level communication protocols. In this paper we describe an integration platform, which is an intermediate step between future IP based systems and available legacy equipment. The platform uses Web services technology for connecting devices to a stand-alone server. This approach makes the system flexible and independent from underlying platform and communication protocols. Conducted measurements with our oBIX based implementation show that our system model is efficient and can be deployed on cheap embedded devices with limited resources for computing.