Building Tetris in a SQL Query!

Nuno Faria
2025-10-24 ·
Date 2025-10-24
Event PGConf.EU 2025
Speaker Nuno Faria (INESC TEC / University of Minho)
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Abstract

While SQL is a powerful declarative language to query and modify data, it is not designed for general programming tasks. However, since the introduction of recursive Common Table Expressions (CTEs) in SQL:1999, SQL became a Turing complete language. Informally, this means that, in theory, we can implement "any" algorithm in it.

This talk presents a complete implementation of Tetris in a single SQL query, by taking advantage of recursive Common Table Expressions and DuckDB's USING KEY feature.

Code

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