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Ironically most programmers I know have no trouble with loops but struggle with SQL. The most common SQL error they make is trying to use loops. (RBAR: Row by A

Ironically most programmers I know have no trouble with loops but struggle with SQL. The most common SQL error they make is trying to use loops. (RBAR: Row by Agonizing Row)

ZenoArrow 10y ago
If a programmer is struggling with SQL in the way you describe, I'd suggest they learn how to perform MapReduce in the programming language of their choice. That should help give them a better understanding of how to approach SQL. If their language doesn't have good support for the MapReduce approach, a quick introduction in any functional language should help.
- danso 10y ago
  I teach SQL to students who may have no programming experience at all, unfortunately
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    The MapReduce advice was only meant for programmers who had to unlearn imperative programming habits. Non-programmers won't have imperative programming habits to unlearn.
beefield 10y ago
As an amusing anecdote, my friend was working with a _really_ slow query (it took literally days to run a query), and their consult/software vendor/whatnot that had written the query kept telling that your data is so large/complex that you really need to look into big data systems like Hadoop. Turns out the SQL query was running on for-loops. With some tinkering my friend got rid of the loops, and after that the query run in less than three minutes. No more talking about Hadoop there.