Yahoo! Query Language (YQL)
I recently talked about one of the projects I’ve been working on at Yahoo!, YQL, at the Yahoo! Open Hack day where hackers had some time to play with it. YDN has just released the presentation I did:
We’re still putting the finishing touches on the system but the documentation and slides have gone up and we’d love to hear any thoughts developers have on the forums on YDN.
One of the parts you can’t get to just yet, but talked about in the documentation and used at hackday, is the console. This enables you to start experimenting with the language without any hassle (no oauth, or application Ids etc), and has a set of sample queries to choose from on the right:
YQL testing console
Here’s one of the sample queries that doesn’t make use of the yahoo tables, but instead works on arbitrary data on the web:
select * from rss where
url in (select title from atom where
url="http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/[id]/[id2]/public/basic")
and description like "%texas%" LIMIT 10
… which looks through an external XML document (in this case a spreadsheet) for URLs that point to various news RSS feeds. For each feed it then looks for any articles talking about “texas” and outputs them – in essence aggregating and filtering a bunch of feeds in a single statement. Its very similar to one of the most popular types of Pipe that people regularly build.
September 20th, 2008 at 2:54 am
Congrats! Glad to see this making it out into the wild.
Hope you’re doing well.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
[...] was involved in creating YQL and am very pleased to see it being released to the public today. Jonathan’s talk gives a great overview of YQL. (Jonathan’s posted about the YQL Launch [...]
October 29th, 2008 at 8:17 am
[...] our team architect gave an awesome presentation recently on YQL, please check it out. Props to the rest of the YQL team Nagesh, Josh, Brad and Sam. [...]
October 29th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Awesome! The Console is really the selling point for me – love the examples. I’m definitely getting a lot more ideas by seeing it in action.
Also, it looks like there’s a comma in the link to the YQL documentation, which break the link.
Thanks for your video – I’ll watch it more in-depth in a bit.