SQL: One of the most valuable skills • Hacker News Board

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#201

Post by sonnyblarney » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:57 AM UTC

slap_shot wrote: post #67

SQL is one the most amazing concepts I've ever experienced. It's nearly 5 decades old and there is no sign of a replacement. We've created countless other technologies to store and process data, and we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those technologies (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc). I run a early stage company that builds analytics infrastructure for companies. We are betting very heavily on SQL, and Craigs p…

Just because it is resilient, does not mean it is good.

'Being great' usually helps a product gain traction. When SQL came about, it was very useful because hey 'I can query data!'.

But it's usually other reasons that drive incumbency.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#202

Post by slifin » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 7:58 AM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #188

EGreg wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask a simple question about efficiency? It seems to me that graph databases are far more efficient than relational ones for most tasks. That’s because all lookups are O(1) instead of O(log N). That adds up. Also, copying a subgraph is far easier, and so is joining. Think about it, when you shard you are essentially approaching graph databases because your hash or range by which you find your shard is basically…

In practice enterprise applications do a lot of relational operations. Graph DBs might be valuable for a lot of problems, and it does feel like something like Neo4J would make a lot of sense for stuff like social networks, but for business records stuff isn't really that spread out

Although if you want versioning to the attribute level, you'd want something that spread out, see Datomic

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#203

Post by anarazel » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:00 AM UTC

hardwaresofton wrote: post #164

baroffoos wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GraphQL doesn't even seem like the same kind of tool. GraphQL is what you expose as an api to users. It can only do a fraction of what SQL does and thats a very good thing. You certainly don't want users running their own SQL on your server.

I'd disagree -- I (and some other SQL/postgres zealots), would say that allowing users to run SQL on your own server is only a bad thing when you are running a database with insufficient configuration and/or security features. We just might happen to live in a world where all the RDBMSes have that same failing, but I'd argue Postgres doesn't fail as bad in the are with things like row level security[0]. [0]: https://…

It's near trivial to exhaust resources when you have SQL access. That's not information disclosure, but it's darn painful if the set of users includes a sizable enough group of bad faith actors.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#204

Post by Pamar » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:03 AM UTC

jwdunne wrote: post #197

slap_shot wrote: post #67

SQL is one the most amazing concepts I've ever experienced. It's nearly 5 decades old and there is no sign of a replacement. We've created countless other technologies to store and process data, and we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those technologies (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc). I run a early stage company that builds analytics infrastructure for companies. We are betting very heavily on SQL, and Craigs p…

Can you recommend good resources for engineers to up their skills with SQL that'll provide the understanding you discuss?

I am not the OP but I would suggest anyone who wants to get better at SQL to read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-SQL-Stephane-Faroult/dp/059600894...

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#205

Post by bogidon » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:09 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #115

slap_shot wrote: post #67

SQL is one the most amazing concepts I've ever experienced. It's nearly 5 decades old and there is no sign of a replacement. We've created countless other technologies to store and process data, and we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those technologies (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc). I run a early stage company that builds analytics infrastructure for companies. We are betting very heavily on SQL, and Craigs p…

"we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those languages (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc)." This is largely because of the number of non-programmers who know SQL. Add an SQL layer on top of your non-SQL database and you instantly open up a wide variety of reporting & analytics functionality to PMs, data scientists, business analysts, finance people, librarians (seriously! I have a couple librarian-as-in-dead-trees fr…

It’s not surprising librarians use SQL. Library science is all about organizing (informational) data!

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#206

Post by drej » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:11 AM UTC

Valuable yet fairly common.

I remember interviewing at FAANG and being asked to code up various tree traversal algorithms... and moments later I would be asked to write window function aggregations in SQL. And it was like this for all the interviews with that company - it was fairly bizarre as I wasn't sure what the aim there was. I understand that SQL is omnipresent, but surely people with algorithmic knowledge would be able to pick up SQL in hours or days, while the opposite doesn't quite hold.

(Oh and I agree with the article and I do like SQL for all sorts of workloads, that's not the point.)

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#207

Post by vinceguidry » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:13 AM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #183

neokantian wrote: post #39

> Learning SQL once will allow you to re-use it heavily across your career span without having to re-learn. Like all good abstractions, SQL is the practical expression of a mathematical theory. In the case of SQL, you use Zermelo-Fränckel (ZF) set theory to reason about data sets. While it is easy to come up with merely conjectural implementations for haphazardly doing things -- arbitrary trial and error, really -- i…

Have you written more things I can read?

His/her comment history is fairly interesting. Plenty of seemingly needlessly downvoted comments, which to me is a marker of a perceptive mind.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#208

Post by fogetti » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:17 AM UTC

My two cents (I haven't read the blog yet so there is that): everybody thinks it's important but when you mention table inheritance or materialized views then the loudest (how to call them not to hurt their feelings...maybe proponents(?)) are the most clueless of all the folks.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#209

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:18 AM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #186

nostrademons wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those languages (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc)." This is largely because of the number of non-programmers who know SQL. Add an SQL layer on top of your non-SQL database and you instantly open up a wide variety of reporting & analytics functionality to PMs, data scientists, business analysts, finance people, librarians (seriously! I have a couple librarian-as-in-dead-trees fr…

I understand your perspective, but I look at it a different way. SQL is troublesome to some programming types because it seems alien to ask what you want instead of telling the computer what to do and I find most programmers, especially ASD-types (who I think have an edge for some situations, like writing certain code in a huge org like Google) find this an unfamiliar and strange way of thinking. You're right about s…

> SQL is troublesome to some programming types because it seems alien to ask what you want instead of telling the computer what to do and I find most programmers, especially ASD-types (who I think have an edge for some situations, like writing certain code in a huge org like Google) find this an unfamiliar and strange way of thinking.

That's basically how most tools work outside of software development. When you use Google, you aren't telling it how to find your result; you're telling it what you want.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#210

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Feb 13, 2019, 8:21 AM UTC

drej wrote: post #206

Valuable yet fairly common. I remember interviewing at FAANG and being asked to code up various tree traversal algorithms... and moments later I would be asked to write window function aggregations in SQL. And it was like this for all the interviews with that company - it was fairly bizarre as I wasn't sure what the aim there was. I understand that SQL is omnipresent, but surely people with algorithmic knowledge woul…

> I understand that SQL is omnipresent, but surely people with algorithmic knowledge would be able to pick up SQL in hours or days, while the opposite doesn't quite hold.

As someone who knows essentially zero SQL, is this really true? How long would it take me to learn it well enough to be competent with it?