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SQL is just much more powerful. If your staff learns SQL they can pull out very complex reports easily, aggregating and combining, joining data. Expressiveness
by richardknop 9y ago
SQL is just much more powerful. If your staff learns SQL they can pull out very complex reports easily, aggregating and combining, joining data. Expressiveness of SQL allows you to get better results you can get from any visual tool.
- dgudkov 9y agoI deal a lot with SQL for reporting and analysis and wouldn't call a 300-line query easy. I found that visual tools can cover 90% of the cases for querying, merging, aggregating, filtering and calculating. They also help with hand-written SQL for the remaining 10% because you can use them to generate parts of SQL that can be used as subqueries or as a starting point in a hand-written SQL query. Also debugging complex SQL queries can be a pain, because SQL is a declarative language. You can't just put a breakpoint in a SQL query and see capture its intermediate state.
- richardknop 9y agoI guess you are right. Also often you will need to aggregate data from various sources (not only relational database but log files, XML, CSV files etc). I have seen Ab Initio used for this before.