It still amazes my that Don Chamberlain was my dad's college roommate and co-worker at IBM. I always try to weasel college debauchery stories out of him, but as yet have been unsuccessful.
SQL: One of the most valuable skills
71–80 of 390 posts
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#72I’ve been a career analyst for about 12 years so I write SQL every day. I know it very well. I’ve developed a very strong love / hate relationship with it over the years. On one hand, you write what you want to find in fairly common language and you almost always get back what you want if you do it correctly. In many ways, it’s like a precursor to Alexa but in written form. It’s super easy to pick up for non technica…
> It’s super easy to pick up for non technical people. I haven't found that particularly true. I've trained people in SQL and yes, they can do the basics pretty well, but it requires a particular skill to actually write effect complex SQL statements. Non-technical people, being non-technical, generally cannot do that. > it’s extremely difficult to code review I don't see why it's any more difficult than any other log…
I think the operative word there is complex.
Yes non technical people can’t write complex sql, but they can self service basic questions easier than learning Python or R for example.
And it’s difficult to code review SQL because complex business logic means complex data manipulations and those are hard to visualize and comprehend. You don’t have to think in a 3D space so much when you write python.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#73SQL is the most powerful query language ever invented and widely implemented over relation databases IMO (qualified heavily for lurking RDF zealots). Every time you see someone start to invent their own query language, I almost always mark is as folly (similar to when people invent their own configuration languages). Prometheus and GraphQL stand out as recent examples. DBs like Kafka who recognize this and instead of…
SQL is the most powerful query language ever invented
No, its Datalog. Joking aside, they are equally powerful but one could argue about explicit vs implicit joins.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#74Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#75I spent a year in a role where 50% of my duties was writing sql reports. These reports where usually between 500 and 1000 lines of sql a pop. Sometimes the runtime of the report was measured in hours, so learning efficient sql was important. The company had a lot of people that had been writing sql for awhile, and there were lots of cool code snippets floating around. I learned a lot in that year. I've moved to writi…
Do you do much with Excel's SQL connectors? Sheets populates with database results are powerful and reasonably user friendly.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#76SQL is a mind bender for me. I do a lot of work on Data, use python and pandas to do a lot of data magic, but the problem with me is my mind is too procedural in thinking.
- Step 1 - Step 2 - Loop through results in Step 2 - Curate and finish output.
I try very hard to transform the above steps into an SQL statement spanning multiple tables, but always fail and I usually fallback to python for manually extracting and processing the data.
Does anyone else face this problem?
Any suggested guides / books to make me think more SQL'ley ?
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#77The more queries I write on Elasticsearch, the more I value SQL.
Seriously. Each time I have to do something in elasticsearch I'm constantly trying to reason why the creators went about it like this. Yeah hey let's serialize some nested JSON object that contains no less than 2,000 brackets.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#78SQL is a mind bender for me. I do a lot of work on Data, use python and pandas to do a lot of data magic, but the problem with me is my mind is too procedural in thinking. - Step 1 - Step 2 - Loop through results in Step 2 - Curate and finish output. I try very hard to transform the above steps into an SQL statement spanning multiple tables, but always fail and I usually fallback to python for manually extracting and…
I like the Ben Forta SQL in Minutes book.
Just the basics, very clear and easy to understand.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#79SQL is one the most amazing concepts I've ever experienced. It's nearly 5 decades old and there is no sign of a replacement. We've created countless other technologies to store and process data, and we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those technologies (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc). I run a early stage company that builds analytics infrastructure for companies. We are betting very heavily on SQL, and Craigs p…
> we always seem to try to re-create SQL
This tells us that people think SQL is good, but it's unfortunate that this is attempted, because the good thing about SQL is how well it corresponds to its data structures. Attempting to imitate SQL's form, rather than its principal of correspondence, has been counter-productive and prevented the reproduction of its merits. Case in point: Cypher.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#80Reading the thread so far, I see SQL and bash suggested as being valuable skills. Can you suggest more skills and tools like these that are timeless and valuable?
When beginning a green-field project, a broad, 10,000 ft overview of the data models in your application.
Not only in SQL, but also in terms of config files, easy to edit data files for static data, large files, small numerous files, etc etc.
Having the right data model can mean a world of difference as to how flexible your application can be.
Also, decoupling between data models. For example, decoupling related data through proxies and procedural code.