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You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL

cyberomin.github.io

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Re: You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL

#21

Post by pnathan »

There aren't very many DBAs practicing in modern shops and devs don't seem to be too into SQL and delivering excellent SQL queries and schemas. It's its own skillset.

I would also call out the NoSQL hype train here.

NoSQL has its place, and largely its place is when SQL can not tolerate the intensity of traffic or the size of the dataset. You can look at the Dynamo paper for an example of the engineering rationale.

Postgres can take enormous amounts of data at quite decent rates - without spending too much time on tuning even.

Re: You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL

#22

Post by reificator »

cyberomin wrote: post #5
reificator wrote: post #4

I like to think I'm not too nitpicky about fonts, but that st ligature is incredibly distracting. It's the second article I've seen here that uses it over the last few days, but I'm not sure if it's the same site or not.

Thanks for the feedback. Do you have any font preference?

I have no problems with the current one apart from the s and t connecting like that.

Re: You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL

#23

Post by joe_the_user »

mrtksn wrote: post #10

But you don't gain ML/AI know-how by doing SQL, nor you discover previously unknown potential about your product buy sticking to your usual toolset. Not that I necessarily disagree with the OP but I find it deeply uninspirational. What's the difference between using ML/AI for problems traditionally solved by some other tool and using any other tool to solve the same problem unconventionally? Both can be "hacking". I…

But you don't gain ML/AI know-how by doing SQL, nor you discover previously unknown potential about your product buy sticking to your usual toolset.

If current ML/AI is the future and reveals more than anything else could, then it's logical for everyone to be piling onto it whether it's an applicable at the moment or not.

If current ML/AI is just another tool, then it's reasonable to use if and only it's applicable. Sure, not doing ML means you don't get ML insights but doing SQL means you get SQL insights. Back in the day, I recall clever queries could reveal interesting things, find outliner data and so-forth. Certainly, you don't get the powerful ad-hoc statistics power that ML give. But I suspect that power requires extremely large datasets.

Re: You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL

#24

Post by pwg »

cyberomin wrote: post #5
reificator wrote: post #4

I like to think I'm not too nitpicky about fonts, but that st ligature is incredibly distracting. It's the second article I've seen here that uses it over the last few days, but I'm not sure if it's the same site or not.

Thanks for the feedback. Do you have any font preference?

Turning this clause off in your style sheet turns off that awful st ligature:

font-feature-settings: "liga", "dlig";

So just remove that clause from your stylesheet and you'll be rid of that ligature.

Re: You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL

#25

Post by cyberomin »

panic wrote: post #18

I like this article's focus on technology as a way of helping skilled people do their job more effectively. Why shouldn't a business owner be able to use Bash and SQL to run their business? Maybe the solution isn't new technology, but training people to use the old stuff.

This was exactly the point I was making. Thank you.

Re: You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL

#26

Post by oh-kumudo »

The title is often true, but it doesn't mean too much or anything. And the same argument is brought up again and again in the past as well.

What OP suggests, the so called SQL, is basically a heuristic based system. When done probably and carefully, it could of course work very well, and is indeed often used as baseline model to bootstrap a ML system. However, eventually the rule-based system will hit the wall, and ML be the savior of the day to push the metric further for a margin of 20-30%.

So yes, when you are small and has little data, ML is irrelevant. But same thing could be said to too many things in software industry, you probably won't need Docker/Big Data/Fancy JS as well, if you are building a small scale online store.

Choose wisely your tech stack based on your problem, but the title is needlessly sensationalized.

Re: You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL

#28

Post by somenewacc »

cyberomin wrote: post #5
reificator wrote: post #4

I like to think I'm not too nitpicky about fonts, but that st ligature is incredibly distracting. It's the second article I've seen here that uses it over the last few days, but I'm not sure if it's the same site or not.

Thanks for the feedback. Do you have any font preference?

Please stick to a font already in my browser. My network is slow and webpages sometimes get stuck loading; the resources in your page took 40 seconds to load and your font didn't even load yet.

Re: You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL

#29

Post by doughj3 »

cyberomin wrote: post #5
reificator wrote: post #4

I like to think I'm not too nitpicky about fonts, but that st ligature is incredibly distracting. It's the second article I've seen here that uses it over the last few days, but I'm not sure if it's the same site or not.

Thanks for the feedback. Do you have any font preference?

FWIW, this is what I'm seeing: https://imgur.com/a/pbR0SCH
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