We talked to Yahoo! Chief Technologist, Sam Pullara, (@spullara on Twitter) and Jonathon Trevor, the product lead for YQL yesterday. They specifically stressed that Yahoo was trying to stay as close to the SQL language as possible, as this would allow the largest number of developers to make use of YQL without having to learn yet another new language.

The Read/Write Web

While the earlier incarnations of YQL were mainly meant to read data, with the addition of these three new SQL verbs, the focus has now shifted towards writing data back to the net as well. Developers can now use YQL to write and modify data on web services and applications.

To explain how useful this can be, the Yahoo team used a few different examples. A developer can now easily use YQL to update a Twitter account (even authentication with OAuth is possible), for example, or add a new comment to a blog post, or insert any data into a remote database. Basically, developers can now use YQL to write data back to any web site that uses forms for data entry and to any API, including authenticated APIs.

To try this, here is an example from Yahoo (you will have to log in to the YQL console):

Try creating a new tweet from the YQL console, follow this link <a href="https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console?q=use%20%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yqlblog.net%2Fsamples%2Ftwitter.status.xml%27%3B%20insert%20into%20twitter.status%20(status%2Cusername%2Cpassword)%20values%20(%22Playing%20with%20INSERT%20UPDATE%20and%20DELETE%20in%20YQL%22%2C%20%22twitterusername%22%2C%22twitterpassword%22)">to run this</a>:

use 'http://www.yqlblog.net/samples/twitter.status.xml';

insert into twitter.status (status,username,password) values ("Playing with INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE in YQL", "twitterusername","twitterpassword")

Pullara and Trevor also stressed that because Yahoo runs YQL on five datacenters spread over three continents (three in the US, one in Europe, and another one in Asia), executing commands through YQL is generally very fast. Yahoo also set some relatively generous rate limits for the service. Developers who use the service and who identify themselves with an access key can make up to 100,000 calls per day, while anonymous users are restricted to 1000 calls per hour, which is still a pretty good number.