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Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
#52I’ve always felt that SQL is somewhat easy to grasp for basic queries, but gets complex and difficult for even moderate to higher complexity use cases. My eyes glaze over when I read long stored procedures that someone else has written. Any recommended resources to go from beginner/beginner-intermediate to advanced?
The way to learn advanced SQL is to challenge yourself to find a set oriented solution and avoid procedural code. The more unreasonable it feels, the more you learn.
If the solution you find is longer and not much faster than the procedural alternative, you throw it away and fall back on procedural code.
Stored procedures are not advanced SQL. Most of them are not SQL at all. There are a few legitimate reasons for using SPs such as reducing roundtrips to the database and writing little pure functions for use in SQL statements.
But many uses of SPs are just laziness or a symptom of organisational dysfunction.
Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
#53I think the pretext of this articles is ridiculous. Yes, SQL is based around relational algebra, but all programming languages are built on a theoretical foundation. And SQL is very much a "fad" language - it just somehow managed to stick around. The goal was not some sort of mathematical purity, but rather to built a natural language data interface (sounds like something currently very hyped?) and it failed spectacu…
I found PRQL[1] to be good fix for nearly everything I dont like about SQL.
But then it's only a query lang (DDL you still do in SQL then I guess).
Bottom line for me now is that I dont write much of my SQL by hand. AI does a much better job at it. I just read it back and point out mistakes and/or inefficiencies.
Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
#54> If you are a junior developer, “learn SQL properly” is the most valuable 40 hours you can spend. Not a tutorial. Not an ORM. Actual SQL: joins, subqueries, window functions, query plans. That investment pays you back at every job, in every stack, for decades This is the power of low-level reasoning. Today, even for a junior developers, even if they have AI that solves syntax problems, SQL teaches you to reason and…
I find SQL a very thick "wrapper masking low-level logic". Think of the query planning, the index-maintaining, the upholding of guarantees, the writing-to-disk and caching that you are all not doing by using a RDBMS!
I'd say SQL is a very high level language.
"SQL teaches you to reason and approach problems logically" -- I kind of agree here. It teaches relational data mgmt. I think it is better to attack most software design challenges at a higher level, and --once settled at that level-- consider how to "serialize" those solutions to an RDBMS (if that's the tech that you've chosen for persistence; still a very solid choice after 50+ years!).
Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
#55> If you are a junior developer, “learn SQL properly” is the most valuable 40 hours you can spend. Not a tutorial. Not an ORM. Actual SQL: joins, subqueries, window functions, query plans. That investment pays you back at every job, in every stack, for decades This is the power of low-level reasoning. Today, even for a junior developers, even if they have AI that solves syntax problems, SQL teaches you to reason and…
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Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
#56>The Only Programming Language Built on Mathematics, Not Fashion As a modern array language D4M is the natural successor for SQL [1]. D4M is based on mathematics like SQL, specifically associative array algebra but not relational unlike SQL. It's more generic since can it caters to most modern data abstractions including spreadsheets, database tables, matrices, and graphs [2]. You can achieve 100M database inserts pe…
There is no SQL successor: SQL is here to stay. Applying the Lindy effect [1]: after half a century of SQL we can expect it to survive for at least as long. Disruption/displacement of SQL is like attempting to replace email. It's not going to happen. At best an alternative technology can carve out a small niche (and there's nothing wrong with that). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
That wikipedia article was super interesting, I'd never heard of the Lindy Effect before. A bit difficult to wrap my noggin around but really fascinating to think about.
Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
#57I’ve always felt that SQL is somewhat easy to grasp for basic queries, but gets complex and difficult for even moderate to higher complexity use cases. My eyes glaze over when I read long stored procedures that someone else has written. Any recommended resources to go from beginner/beginner-intermediate to advanced?
My advice is: don't write complicated SQL.
The best thing I learned about SQL is that it can do an awful lot of clever stuff but that the vast majority of the time you really don't need it. Learn the basics. Shrug the rest off.
Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
#58But you cannot learn it “once”. You need to continuously use it (over those 30 years, for example) to be proficient at it. It’s not that you can study sql for let’s say, 30 days, and never touch/study it again.
I did “learn” sql at uni… but had to study it again at every company i worked for (different problems triggered different solutions). Im still learning it.
Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
#59[flagged]
Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
#60Well-designed purpose-built tools stand the test of time. When you need a hammer you need a hammer. I learned to swing a hammer a very long time ago, and that skill has stayed with me on modern-day hammers - I didn't have to learn the New Way Of Hammering Things.