SQL: One of the most valuable skills

I took a course in prolog, really seemed to help get my mind in the right place.

Basically, instead of thinking in terms of how to get to the result, think instead of the result and figure out how to get there. For example, let's say I need to get a mapping of students to their classes. One way would be to get the students, then loop through that to get classes for each one. Another way to do it would be to ask the database to combine those sets of data for us instead and return the result (join students and class tables on the student ID).

Basically, find the data you want from each table, tell the database about the relationship between them (join on ), and set up your constraints. I guess you could think about the query as a function, and you're just writing the unit tests for it (when I call X with parameters Y, I expect Z).

https://use-the-index-luke.com/ - great resource for various database products.

Try some functional programming. It will liberate your brain from thinking operationally. You will soon no longer think in terms of steps, loops or anything like that. You will get used to thinking about data transformations, which is what SQL is good at.

A few months ago vogre@ suggested SQL, bash, and HTML, and I concurred.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18001267

HTML is the quickest way to share something permanently. And its client is the most widely available (the browser).

Many people seem to use something like Dropbox or Google Docs now, but my opinion is that HTML still has many benefits, once you know it. I rsync my HTML to a shared hosting account.

In addition to bash, I'd suggest learning more about Unix in general.

I saw this page a few weeks ago. I haven't gone through this particular course, and I don't necessarily endorse it, but I'll just say that the subject matter could have been largely the same 20 years ago. Unix has proven to be an effective way of working and collaborating for a long time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078281

EDIT: I also suggest knowing some basic analysis outside of SQL, using data frames:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19150543

The need for that skill isn't going away anytime soon. You could argue that a large portion of jobs are munging Excel spreadsheets, and data frames are more of less the programmer's way of accomplishing the same tasks.

You could be a snob and "delegate" those tasks to others, but IME if you really want to get something done that other people can't, you have to roll up your sleeves a bit. (Just like this article suggests, e.g. SQL is useful for both programmers and product managers.)

You can get to the opposite conclusion with some perspective. Just two decades ago SQL was pretty much a mandatory skill for new programmers. Everyone was learning it, it was in every programming job requirement in any way related to storing some data, etc. Basically databases and SQL were synonymous. But today a Citus guy writes a post attempting to convince people to learn some SQL (Citus is an SQL database company). And last time I used SQL was when Chromium dropped my cookies after an update and I was too lazy to relogin to all the websites (it stores them in an SQLite database). I guess things are not looking so promising for SQL.

Maybe we'll get to a better query language eventually. Distributed systems have some fundamental incompatibilities with SQL and theoretically could standardize on a different language, one that is not just about the data anymore, but that also lets users express and choose various performance and consistency trade-offs. I mean a query shouldn't, for example, invoke a transaction and consensus algorithm when all you need is to increment a view counter or give a one star rating or insert a log entry, those things can be propagated eventually without destroying latency and throughput and without complicating anything with transactional semantics.