Learn SQL, dammit

#1

Post by jpgjb » Wed, May 08, 2013, 6:21 PM UTC

Learn SQL, dammit
gun.io

Re: Learn SQL, dammit

#2

Post by thelarry » Wed, May 08, 2013, 6:27 PM UTC

How do you optimize your system if you don't understand the queries that the ORM generates?

Re: Learn SQL, dammit

#3

Post by untog » Wed, May 08, 2013, 6:31 PM UTC

I once interviewed a guy with a Masters in computing (of some sort, I forget) who didn't know SQL. He'd been developing for years, but lived entirely in .NET land and just used ORMs.

Absolutely crazy.

Re: Learn SQL, dammit

#4

Post by mongol » Wed, May 08, 2013, 6:33 PM UTC

I don't understand how it is possible to develop anything database-related without knowing SQL. Are these people not querying the database directly to figure out what it contains (during development, debugging, testing etc etc)?

Re: Learn SQL, dammit

#5

Post by overshard » Wed, May 08, 2013, 6:34 PM UTC

Learn caching, dammit

Re: Learn SQL, dammit

#6

Post by thelarry » Wed, May 08, 2013, 6:37 PM UTC

overshard wrote: post #5

Learn caching, dammit

Can't you learn both?

Re: Learn SQL, dammit

#7

Post by plorkyeran » Wed, May 08, 2013, 6:38 PM UTC

mongol wrote: post #4

I don't understand how it is possible to develop anything database-related without knowing SQL. Are these people not querying the database directly to figure out what it contains (during development, debugging, testing etc etc)?

I've never seen a GUI frontend that managed to remove the need to write custom queries while inspecting the data, but if you don't know SQL I could see someone not even realizing all the things that can be trivially done with a relational database, and just settling for manually cross-referencing tables.

Re: Learn SQL, dammit

#8

Post by hmsimha » Wed, May 08, 2013, 6:40 PM UTC

mongol wrote: post #4

I don't understand how it is possible to develop anything database-related without knowing SQL. Are these people not querying the database directly to figure out what it contains (during development, debugging, testing etc etc)?

Well there's the whole world of NoSQL but without understanding the relational model there's no guarantee that your choice of NoSQL is appropriate. From what I understand, many of the prominent advocates of NoSQL even recommend learning relational first.

Re: Learn SQL, dammit

#9

Post by mikeevans » Wed, May 08, 2013, 6:40 PM UTC

thelarry wrote: post #6

overshard wrote: post #5

Learn caching, dammit

Can't you learn both?

He's referring to the fact that the site is down already.

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Agun.i...

Re: Learn SQL, dammit

#10

Post by pjungwir » Wed, May 08, 2013, 6:40 PM UTC

For a while I used to ask interview candidates to explain the difference between WHERE and HAVING, to see if they'd ever done anything beyond the basics. I'm still not sure if that's too hard, but people who could answer it did tend to do much better in the rest of the interview as well.