We're currently moving our Druid/Kafka/Spark setup to BigQuery because of how simple SQL is.
Why you should learn SQL
21–30 of 137 posts
Re: Why you should learn SQL
#22You should learn SQL because it's likely to be a very different language to the ones you already know. In SQL you don't tell the DB how to get the data (for loops and pointers) but what the result should look like, and the DB figures out an execution plan. This style is well worth practising and appreciating.
Re: Why you should learn SQL
#23I've spent most of my career hoping that something - anything that's better than SQL will come along and replace it. It's like FORTRAN, except FORTRAN has had the decency to stay in use where it's really the best choice. But SQL is out there, like Clippy. "Hey, I see you're collecting some data. SELECT TRUE FROM HELP WHERE COLLECTING_DATA IS TRUE
Re: Why you should learn SQL
#24> The SQL langauge is old, strange, and important.
I've always found it strange that something hasn't replace SQL, particularly for traditional 'web' client/server applications. But SQL is probably the only technology/language that has survived in the past 30 years of my career.
99% of their SQL databases probably don't require transactions and ACID behaviour. There nearly always needs to be a layer to convert the rows into a format for use (blobs of JSON for a front end etc). Complex queries are hard enough to be used as standard interview questions.
I guess the out of the box performance, availability and reliability of SQL databases, that 0.1% of times when you need ACID writes and transactionality, and the (just about) interoperable SQL makes it an easy choice - no one was fired for choosing SQL.
Re: Why you should learn SQL
#25SQL is going to eventually die because of its three-pronged relationship model that implies query-time complexity. Learn it if you want, but especially backend and analytics people would be better off learning Gremlin or Cypher. Edit: downvoting this is not going to make it untrue.
You are getting doenvoted because it's untrue. So many faang companies using traditional SQL. And for good reasons. Not to say your two examples are bad. They have their own benefit. But don't become the guy who believes in one replacement solution for all without the knowledge of all. It's annoying
Re: Why you should learn SQL
#26I've spent most of my career hoping that something - anything that's better than SQL will come along and replace it. It's like FORTRAN, except FORTRAN has had the decency to stay in use where it's really the best choice. But SQL is out there, like Clippy. "Hey, I see you're collecting some data. SELECT TRUE FROM HELP WHERE COLLECTING_DATA IS TRUE
Nobody else has invented any other declarative language it seems.
Come on aspiring post-docs, do your thing and launch a new programming language.
If MIT can launch Julia someone can launch a language that's not SQL.
Re: Why you should learn SQL
#27SQL is going to eventually die because of its three-pronged relationship model that implies query-time complexity. Learn it if you want, but especially backend and analytics people would be better off learning Gremlin or Cypher. Edit: downvoting this is not going to make it untrue.
That is a truism everything is eventually going to die - but SQL has been around for longer than just about all development technologies today and probably will be around a lot longer than things that are popular now. I would guess that it will be around when people have move on from React, Gremlin, and Cypher.
Re: Why you should learn SQL
#28I've built a desktop app that enables you to load CSV files and perform SQL on the CSVs. I imagine it would be handy for anyone who starts learning SQL because you don't need to setup the database or use command-line. If you are interested, please try it out: https://superintendent.app
It's nice. Windows only? (I mostly use a Mac at home). EDIT: no, it's Win/Mac/Linux, apologies...
There’s also csvkit.
Re: Why you should learn SQL
#29I am using spring hibernate. It's so powerful. I don't need to write and understand SQL anymore. Sarcasm off: I see more and more juniors without SQL skills. Various reasons they give me. From the nosql plague to some cloud solutions to the above example. SQL seems to be not so fun anymore. I have a hard time understanding that. Since data storage is such a fundamental part of your application. I would even argue tha…
SQL is useful but we’ve spent decades to abstract it away, because the Java/SQL articulation is always circumvoluted, and juniors do without.
Then they load two tables in Java and join them manually in memory; or they fetch the principal record, and use the getter to retrieve the dependency, so Hibernate does one query per row.
I accuse all ORMs, especially Hibernate, of making it too easy to skip SQL, and I accuse Java of not supporting multiline strings. We have failed, in most languages, at making it easy enough to write SQL yourself. JPA is nice to cache records in memory, but it’s been way more harmful to performance that it became hard to write SQL directly.
Re: Why you should learn SQL
#30I've spent most of my career hoping that something - anything that's better than SQL will come along and replace it. It's like FORTRAN, except FORTRAN has had the decency to stay in use where it's really the best choice. But SQL is out there, like Clippy. "Hey, I see you're collecting some data. SELECT TRUE FROM HELP WHERE COLLECTING_DATA IS TRUE
The closest that many have come to is to develop ORM libraries. LINQ + EntityFramework Core is my favorite.