The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know • Hacker News Board

Re: The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

#41

Post by iamsomewalrus » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

HillRat wrote: post #6

petcat wrote: post #5

I've loved and used Django ORM and SQLAlchemy for many years. It got me a long way in my career. But at this point I've sworn-off using query-builders and ORMs. I just write real, hand-crafted SQL now. These "any db" abstractions just make for the worst query patterns. They're easy and map nicely to your application language, but they're really terrible unless you want to put in the effort to meta-program SQL using w…

The cargo-cult shibboleth of "never put business logic in your database" certainly didn't help, since a lot of developers just turned that into "never use stored procedures or views, your database is a dumb store with indexes."

genuinely curious, can you steel man stored procedures? views make intuitive sense to me, but stored procedures, much like meta-programming, needs to be sparingly used IMO.

At my new company, the use of stored procedures unchecked has really hurt part of the companies ability to build new features so I'm surprised to see what seems like sound advice, "don't use stored procedures", called out as a cargo cult.

Re: The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

#42

Post by simlan » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

rtkwe wrote: post #33

system2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Claude Code writes superb SQL queries for very complex data. I was dealing with PostgreSQL recently, and it improved the query from 30 seconds to 5 seconds. I couldn't figure it out myself.

How do you present the interrelations between the tables when you're dealing with complex table structures?

Prompting with documentation and examples works. In an agentic tool having an MCP server for the db helps assuming it is a straightforward schema with explicitly defined relationships. Also helps if the tables correspond to entities in a natural way.

Re: The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

#43

Post by walthamstow » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

danem wrote: post #34

petcat wrote: post #5

I've loved and used Django ORM and SQLAlchemy for many years. It got me a long way in my career. But at this point I've sworn-off using query-builders and ORMs. I just write real, hand-crafted SQL now. These "any db" abstractions just make for the worst query patterns. They're easy and map nicely to your application language, but they're really terrible unless you want to put in the effort to meta-program SQL using w…

Anytime this topic comes up, this opinion is invariably at the top of the comments. However I've never seen a non-trivial application made this way. Mind sharing one? More than the query generation, I think people reach for ORMs for static typing, mapping, migrations, transactions, etc. I'm not doubting that it can be done, I'm just curious to see how it's done.

The company I work for is one such example. We write inline SQL in a Python Flask+Celery app which processes >$3bn of salaries a month. The stated goal from the CTO, who was an early engineer, is simplicity.

Re: The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

#44

Post by randomNumber7 » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 9:48 PM UTC

TomasBM wrote: post #8

Somewhat tangential to the article, but why is SQL considered a programming language ? I understand that's the convention according to the IEEE and Wikipedia [1], but the name itself - Structured Query Language - reveals that its purpose is limited by design. It's a computer language [2] for sure, but why programming ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C…

Also SQL is not turing complete. I see it more as a descriptive language like e.g. html is a language but not a programming language.

Re: The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

#45

Post by brikym » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

I much prefer Kusto query language. SQL needs a few tweaks so that it's more type safe and supports auto completion. Some engines support From-first which is a good start.

Re: The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

#46

Post by elevation » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

b450 wrote: post #24

petcat wrote: post #5

I've loved and used Django ORM and SQLAlchemy for many years. It got me a long way in my career. But at this point I've sworn-off using query-builders and ORMs. I just write real, hand-crafted SQL now. These "any db" abstractions just make for the worst query patterns. They're easy and map nicely to your application language, but they're really terrible unless you want to put in the effort to meta-program SQL using w…

ORMs come with a lot of baggage that I prefer to avoid, but it probably depends on the domain. Take an e-commerce store with faceted search. You're pretty much going to write your own query builder if you don't use one off the shelf, seems like.

I once boasted about avoiding ORM until an experienced developer helped me to see that 100% hand‑rolled SQL and customer query builders is just you writing your own ORM by hand.

Since then I've embraced ORMs for CRUD. I still double-check its output, and I'm not afraid to bypass it when needed.

Re: The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

#47

Post by tdfirth » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

If you do backend web development in 99% of software companies then being very good at whatever your RDBMS is is a superpower.

It's definitely worth learning SQL very well, but you also need to learn the data structures your RDBMS uses, how queries translate into operations on that data, and what those operations look like in a query plan.

You can go surprisingly far with just that knowledge.

A great resource is https://use-the-index-luke.com/

Re: The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

#48

Post by ifh-hn » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 10:11 PM UTC

I've always gravitated towards query languages and SQL is one of my favourites. I've never really understood the need for ORMs and other abstractions but then I'm not a software developer.

If I was going to chose a "third" language I'd say regex.

Re: The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

#49

Post by morkalork » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 10:11 PM UTC

zanellato19 wrote: post #36

danem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anytime this topic comes up, this opinion is invariably at the top of the comments. However I've never seen a non-trivial application made this way. Mind sharing one? More than the query generation, I think people reach for ORMs for static typing, mapping, migrations, transactions, etc. I'm not doubting that it can be done, I'm just curious to see how it's done.

Every single time. Where are these developers? Orms are a god send 98% of the time. Sure, write some SQL from time to time, but the majority of the time just use the ORM.

I worked at a company where we used Dapper with plain SQL. Like the sibling commenter said, simplicity. There were never [ORM] issues to debug and queries could easily be inspected.

Re: The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know

#50

Post by saxenaabhi » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 10:13 PM UTC

zanellato19 wrote: post #36

danem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anytime this topic comes up, this opinion is invariably at the top of the comments. However I've never seen a non-trivial application made this way. Mind sharing one? More than the query generation, I think people reach for ORMs for static typing, mapping, migrations, transactions, etc. I'm not doubting that it can be done, I'm just curious to see how it's done.

Every single time. Where are these developers? Orms are a god send 98% of the time. Sure, write some SQL from time to time, but the majority of the time just use the ORM.

We have a POS system where entire blogic is postgres functions.

There are many others as well. Sure Rails/Laravel/Django people use the ORM supplied by their framework, but many of us feel it's un-necessary and limiting.

Limiting because for example many of them don't support cte queries(rails only added it a couple of years ago). Plus it get weird when sometimes you have to use sql.raw because your ORM can't express what you want.

Also transactions are way faster when done in a SQL function than in code. I have also seen people do silly things like call startTransaction in code and the do a network request resulting in table lock for the duration of that call.

Some people complain that writing postgres functions make testing harder, but with pglite it's a non issue.

As an aside I have seen people in finance/healthcare rely on authorization provided by their db, and just give access to only particular tables/functions to a sql role owned by a specific team.