SQL on FHIR WG Meetings
SQL on FHIR WG Meeting — June 23, 2026
Arjun Sanyal
Arjun Sanyal
Principal Antidote Solutions
Nikolai Ryzhikov
Nikolai Ryzhikov
CTO at Health Samurai
Gino Canessa
Gino Canessa
Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft
John Grimes
John Grimes
Principal Research Consultant CSIRO
AD
Adam Culbertson
Jun 23, 2026

Topics discussed:

  • The open question is whether $viewdefinition-materialise becomes a resource or stays a set of operations. Nikolai argued for a resource: it has a lifecycle, an identity, metadata worth looking at, and a dependency graph — the same things that make Subscription a resource. Gino was wary of the overhead of minting a new resource type and leaned towards operations.
  • John closed off the third option: hanging extensions on ViewDefinition or Library does not work, because those live on a different clock than a materialisation does. So it really is resource versus operations, and Nikolai agreed to write both up side by side.
  • Either way the fields are much the same: what view it points at, status, table name, schema, and optional freshness controls. Gino floated raising "infrastructure resource" as a category at FHIR-I, since Subscription would sit in it too.
  • PR #369 moves both async export operations off the old Bulk Data pattern onto the simplified FHIR async pattern — a status poll now answers with a 303 See Other pointing at the result, and the manifest itself is unchanged. #373 fixes inconsistent naming and #374 constrains operation parameters to their profiles; both were agreed to be uncontroversial.
  • A conformance test was approved for forEach nested through select inside forEachOrNull — worth having because an implementation can pass the unionAll version of that case and still get the select version wrong.