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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

#31

Post by rs86 »

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…

I think the OP just meant that you can get a lot done with databases queries and a bit of automation. There's no need to call that ML/AI.

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

#32

Post by reificator »

pwg wrote: post #24
cyberomin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like ligatures when they're used well, but that one is just incredibly distracting.

Shame the advice is to turn them off completely...

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

#34

Post by autokad »

pnathan wrote: post #21

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.…

usually I am joining many different data sets many of which include some time of log data (sometimes petabytes in size but usually a few TB). the logs are persisted to hdfs or s3, which is why spark and hive make such a nice way of doing work compared to something like postgress.

also, its nice to plop json, avro, csvs, parquet, or what ever data in storage and just query/join/analyze it. no need to put the story on hold because you are waiting for the oracle dba to increase space again.

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

#35

Post by benkarst »

There's no logical equivalency between SQL and ML/AI.

SQL is a language that helps retrieve the data you're looking. ML/AI helps you predict the future (using past data).

Maybe this is directed towards product people? But it has SQL in the title so it can't be. I'm confused as to who the audience is here.

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

#36

Post by whoisjuan »

gwbas1c wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm niave, but are there really people who want to hop on the AI bandwagon just to do mundane lookups like this? When I worked with machine learning many years ago, we learned that it was no better than the heuristics already in place. The thing is, it's much easier to diagnose a well written and understood heuristic than a machine learning model.

Machine Learning is usually seeen as a magic black box by many people. So yes. There's a recent trend that seems to favor a machine learning first approach to solve very simple and mundane problems because people feel that they are missing some magic insight if they don't do it (FOMO).

For example, the author refers to a shopping newsletter where you personalize suggestions for certain products after a customer buys a particular product. This is very often a machine learning 101 example but really there's nothing preventing you from writing those heuristics yourself -no ML involved(e.g: if a customer buys a pillow, suggest pillow cases).

Machine learning does makes sense for something like that if your website is Amazon, but is definitely an overkill if your website is an e-commerce for house garments.

The funny thing is that usually you will end up writing those heuristics implicitly since you need to label your data anyways.

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

#37

Post by tylerjwilk00 »

benkarst wrote: post #35

There's no logical equivalency between SQL and ML/AI. SQL is a language that helps retrieve the data you're looking. ML/AI helps you predict the future (using past data). Maybe this is directed towards product people? But it has SQL in the title so it can't be. I'm confused as to who the audience is here.

You're missing the point. Much of the "intelligence" that AI/ML is touted as solving could be accomplished through standard SQL queries on well normalized data. But no one will invest in a company because we have proper data structures and accurate SQL reports that we learn from.

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

#38

Post by autokad »

joe_the_user wrote: post #23
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.…

I think its going to be like websites/internet back in the early 2000s. Everyone knew it was the future, but didn't know what to make of it. Many did it wrong and the profits (if there were any) didn't live up to expectations. then bubble burst. lots gave up, but the survivors, and the ones that learned how to do it right ended up with near unassailable moats. now a large portion of businesses today have an internet/app presence, and its seen as indispensable to their business.

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

#39

Post by pwg »

reificator wrote: post #32
pwg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like ligatures when they're used well, but that one is just incredibly distracting. Shame the advice is to turn them off completely...

Testing a big more, just dropping "dlig" from the feature settings declaration turns off the awful st ligature. So they don't have to 'all' be turned off to get rid of that one. What I don't know is what other ones get turned off by dropping "dlig" from the declaration.

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

#40

Post by tfehring »

>say a person bought a pair of shoe, sunglasses and a book. For their newsletter, we will show include shoes, sunglasses and books. This was a lot more relevant than sending random stuff.

I agree with the general sentiment of the article, but this seems like a poor example, since a more sophisticated approach can add a lot of value to a recommendation system. How do you know whether a customer is likely to want more than one item in any of those categories? If they already purchased sunglasses, wouldn't they be more likely to purchase, say, a sunglasses case and/or sunscreen? If they purchased a book, do you recommend the same book again? And if not, how do you choose which book(s) to include?

Of course, you could technically still handle this in SQL with a bunch of CASE statements, but obviously that doesn't scale well across a wide range of products. The whole point of ML/AI in that use case is to scale that type of nontrivial decision making.

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