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SQL: One of the most valuable skills

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Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#281

Post by CRConrad »

lmm wrote: post #257
ako wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tooling do you need? They're just source code files that you can edit with a code editor or an IDE (DataGrip). In addition you need a file to deploy your sql to a database, this can be a sql or shell script, or a gradle file or even make.

> What tooling do you need? Jump-to-definition when something calls something else. Unit tests. Atomic build/install. > this can be a sql or shell script, or a gradle file or even make. Precisely the problem. There's too many different ways to do it, and no consistency.

How is this a problem? There are many code editors / IDEs / plain text editors in use with pretty much every other programming language, and code in those languages can be put in version control from all of them. What you're saying is equivalent to “Only Java¹ code from The One True Java¹ IDE with all these features can be put into git”. So which One True IDE is that, and where's your proof that only code from that IDE can be found on, say, GitHub?

___ 1: Replace with C, C++, Basica, FORTRAN, COBOL, JavaScript, Ruby, Closure...

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#282

Post by FroshKiller »

dsego wrote: post #250

Reading the comments here is like someone with years of experience with jQuery saying how jQuery is simple and powerful and nothing will replace it. SQL is to relational databases what jQuery is to the DOM, only shittier (maybe like mootools) and refuses to die, probably because all these SQL experts aren't really good programmers. Reading some compare SQL to 70s style procedural code tells me they haven't moved on f…

I find that programmers with a chip on their shoulder about SQL have poor SQL proficiency. And I don't mean "poor" in the sense of not knowing about window functions. I mean coding a query inside of an enumerator and wondering why they get feedback about poor performance in production.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#283

Post by FroshKiller »

saagarjha wrote: post #210
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?

In my experience, "algorithmic knowledge" doesn't indicate that you'll be any damn good at SQL.

I think the time it takes depends on what competence looks like for your use case. If we're talking about just retrieving records that match certain criteria, you might get over the hump of understanding joins faster than a non-programmer, and you could probably write 90% of the queries you'll ever need in a week or less.

Reporting is different. Designing schema is different. Troubleshooting data issues in a poorly designed database is way different. Tuning queries and indexes for performance is way different. Not all use cases include those things.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#284

Post by OliverJones »

ako wrote: post #237
JimmyAustin wrote: post #49

My first job out of university was on an analytics team at a consulting firm (big enough that you know them) that used MS SQL Server for absolutely everything. Data cleaning? SQL. Feature engineering? SQL. Pipelines of stored procedures, stored in other stored procedures. Some of these procedures were so convoluted that they outputted tables with over 700 features, and had queries that were hundreds of lines long. Ev…

There's no reason you can't store your sql/tsql/plsql in version control. We were doing this 20+ years ago, all code was in csv (we upgraded from rcs to csv), and we had a productized distributed scheduling system that would deploy all the sql scripts every night on a number of oracle databases running from aix, to solaris, to vms, to hpux, to irix, and later linux and windows NT. Similar like you would now use jenki…

umm. That's cvs. csv is something else, and it matters if you're a datashoveler.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#285

Post by OliverJones »

If you're early in your career and looking for something useful to learn, SQL's a good bet. It will probably outlast every other part of the tech stack you now use. Everything the author says about SQL is true.

But, like asphalt for roads and aluminum for airplanes, it still can stand a lot of improvement. By the way, it's just as important as asphalt and aluminum, and consequently just as hard to change. That's the curse of the customer base.

I wish the SQL world could agree on standards for string manipulation, and stored function / proc programming.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#287

Post by dustingetz »

nostrademons wrote: post #196
3pt14159 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most programmers who are at all familiar with functional programming, DSLs, configuration languages, or optimizing compilers are very well versed with asking the computer for what you want rather than telling it what to do . At least when I was there, this was a very large percentage of Googlers. My issue with SQL is that a programming language should allow you to compose and name building blocks, and then recombine…

Datomic has host-process value compatibility see #2 http://www.dustingetz.com/:datomic-in-four-snippets/ and composes #4

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#288

Post by vardump »

I wonder if we'll one day get something like SQL, but that is based on hypergraphs instead.

Correct me if I'm wrong; I understand you can represent any relational model in hypergraph. And a lot that aren't representable in relational model, but are natural in hypergraph form.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#289

Post by tapanjk »

nazri1 wrote: post #235

Ha I could say the same thing about my $EDITOR, which happens to be vim. I learned how to use it about 2 decades ago and I still use it almost daily since. Some things are really worth investing your time learning them.

+1

I think the power comes from knowing something -- _anything_ -- well.

I feel the same about vim and common unix tools (bash, sed, awk etc). If you can use these effectively, these can be very effective productivity tools. The learning curve is steep, just like learning to ride a bicycle, but once you do, it is difficult to imagine life without it.

Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills

#290

Post by _bohm »

vardump wrote: post #288

I wonder if we'll one day get something like SQL, but that is based on hypergraphs instead. Correct me if I'm wrong; I understand you can represent any relational model in hypergraph. And a lot that aren't representable in relational model, but are natural in hypergraph form.

Fascinating; I've never heard this. Can you recommend any reading material on the topic?
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