An object-relational mapping (ORM) is a layer that lets you work with a database using native types instead of writing queries directly. In Rust terms, an ORM maps tables to structs, rows to struct instances, and columns to fields, handling serialization, deserialization, and query construction for you.

Toasty is an experimental new ORM for Rust that prioritizes ease of use. It supports both SQL databases as well as some NoSQL databases, including DynamoDB and Cassandra. Rather than hiding the database's capabilities, Toasty exposes features based on the target database.

Carl Lerche, Toasty's designer, is also the original designer of the Tokio asynchronous runtime library.

[Rescheduled after snow day]

How many pages are reachable from Wikipedia's page on the Rust programming language in two hops? Around 30,000, it turns out, including pages on wheat flour, Welsh orthography, and the zombie apocalypse.

As it turns out, it's super easy to do this exploration using asynchronous Rust code. Wikipedia offers a cute little REST API for querying links, and it's easy to use Serde to generate requests and parse replies. And if you're feeling guilty about flooding a precious public resource with silly API requests, it's also super easy to do rate limiting.

Jim Blandy will show how to wire up Tokio, Reqwest, and Serde to do the spidering, and whip up a mock server for testing using Warp. The techniques shown work nicely for all kinds of REST API scripting, including, say, GitHub.

In this talk, Mustafa Akur will take you behind the scenes of query execution with Apache DataFusion. You’ll explore how queries are parsed, optimized, and executed, and gain insight into the architectural principles that make DataFusion fast, extensible, and modular. The talk will delve into the goals of the Apache DataFusion project, the problems it aims to solve in the modern data ecosystem, and why Rust is a key part in the story.