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SQL: One of the most valuable skills

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Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#51

Post by war1025 »

whynotminot wrote: post #6

Having a solid working toolkit of SQL knowledge really will make you seem very useful on a team. I do say "seem" though, in that if you weren't around it's not like the team would fail without you. It's not hard to learn SQL or Google around for a little bit to figure out what you're trying to accomplish. Sort of like that one guy on your team who's a wizard at regular expressions. He seems like a life saver in the m…

There is a big difference between "get's the correct data out of the database" and "get's the data efficiently"

A significant percentage of my time over the past few years has been spent optimizing queries that other people did in obvious, but non-ideal ways.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#52

Post by jpatokal »

jweir wrote: post #32
dhbradshaw wrote: post #17

SQL is nice on a surface level and helpful in practice. Having a working intuition for relational databases is valuable on a deep level. I mean having a sense of how to organize the tables, what sizes are large and small, when to add what kind of index and what the size and speed limits are likely to be for a given data structure. That's extremely valuable. BTW, we're preparing to move a postgres database that's a fe…

Ok, we had a MySQL DB around 500GB, and not on Heroku, but we used the AWS Database Migration Service: https://aws.amazon.com/dms/ We had just a few minutes of downtime. I did have few issues around permissions, but an AWS support person walked me through the process and we got it up and running. The support was great, and we just have standard business support. EDIT: DMS might be a no go, as jpatokal points out. Whi…

Heroku Postgres doesn't support external replicas, which complicates migrations out considerably. If you can't tolerate more than a few min of downtime for writes, you pretty much have to build the replication at the app level.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#53

Post by mongol »

GolDDranks wrote: post #19

I consider myself functional, but not proficient in SQL. Is there a reliable and easy way to assess one's skills in SQL? I feel that most of the new things I learn about SQL these days are database specific. I wonder whether I'm missing out on something, or do I already have the "core" SQL knowledge down, and everything else is special cases?

I recommend you look at one of Markus Winand's presentations, such as this one : https://youtu.be/xEDZQtAHpX8 I felt it summarized well the modern foundation of SQL databases.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#54

Post by nicoritschel »

And more recently, we see SQL abstractions overlaid on top of things like Kafka streams with messages encoded in Avro thanks to technologies like Spark structured streaming.

SQL is not only relevant to traditional databases. I never got into C#, but LINQ looks really interesting.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#56

Post by hardwaresofton »

SQL is the most powerful query language ever invented and widely implemented over relation databases IMO (qualified heavily for lurking RDF zealots). Every time you see someone start to invent their own query language, I almost always mark is as folly (similar to when people invent their own configuration languages). Prometheus and GraphQL stand out as recent examples.

DBs like Kafka who recognize this and instead offer SQL on top of their things take the right approach IMO KSQL.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#57

Post by wvenable »

Hippocrates wrote: post #2

I would say the same about bash.

You can be a good developer and not know bash. Bash is, in some ways, programming horror. But SQL is pretty fundamental. It's a thing onto itself. There are plenty of shells and shell-like languages but there is really only one SQL.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#58

Post by beachy »

jsnk wrote: post #41

Reading the thread so far, I see SQL and bash suggested as being valuable skills. Can you suggest more skills and tools like these that are timeless and valuable?

Data modelling/design (closely related to SQL of course).

i.e. distilling business problems down into tables and columns.

Skills acquired decades ago are still extremely useful.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#59

Post by tingletech »

whynotminot wrote: post #13
nicoburns wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... I'm not sure. I've seen people take hours or even days (in the case of more junior developers) trying to sort out these kind of issues. It's pretty helpful if you have (or are) someone who can waltz over and fix it in a couple of minutes. Complex git problems are another one that can really throw people sometimes.

Oh it's definitely helpful! And it's something I should finally take the time to dedicate a weekend to shoring up my knowledge. Just every time I have to deal with a sql database, my lack of knowledge (at least to this point) has never been a show stopper. It takes me a little more time than a real pro to get my statements figured out, but it's rarely so complex to require canvasing the shop for a true expert.

wait to you have a performance issue in prime time and you need to refactor your query in a hurry

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#60

Post by physcab »

I’ve been a career analyst for about 12 years so I write SQL every day. I know it very well. I’ve developed a very strong love / hate relationship with it over the years.

On one hand, you write what you want to find in fairly common language and you almost always get back what you want if you do it correctly. In many ways, it’s like a precursor to Alexa but in written form. It’s super easy to pick up for non technical people.

On the other hand, it’s extremely difficult to code review, and on a very complicated piece of business logic, errors could mean the difference between hiring 10 more people or laying off 100. So almost always it’s just easier to re-write.

Imagine if engineers couldn’t understand each other’s work, and had to rewrite code every time someone leaves the team. It’s insane to me that this is standard practice.

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