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SQL is amazing IF you understand it. You need to think in sets of things. It's like functional programming paradigms or recursion; once you really truly "get it

SQL is amazing IF you understand it. You need to think in sets of things. It's like functional programming paradigms or recursion; once you really truly "get it" you start to feel like a Jedi master. Unfortunately the vast majority of SQL users aren't that proficient. It's also fairly hard to learn because it's something that you only pick up with experience and specifically longer time experience with a sufficiently complex data model. I personally would never have gotten good at SQL if I hadn't stayed in my first two jobs for 5 years each working daily with the data-models and the domain.

cr0sh 8y ago
I was fortunate that my early SE career experience involved a lot of SQL (and my first experience with a SQL-like query language happened under PICK). But as my career has gone forward, I'm touching it less and less; today, I hardly touch it at all outside of my personal usage. Much of that has to do with the fact that I'm now employed building and maintaining an SPA using javascript and nodejs where the backend is accessed thru a RESTful API; we never get to touch the actual database. The few times I have seen some queries for that DB - albeit not in our API, though I could probably find them somewhere - all I can hope is that the SQL engine being used does some kind of query optimization on-the-fly, because there's so many inner selects that make me cringe it ain't funny (like I wonder if they've heard of joins and such). Before, I was involved in a lot of PHP web apps and backend server automation, where I needed to use SQL a lot; I feel like I am getting rusty in it.
SatvikBeri 8y ago
You could make a language that had all those benefits + almost all the things nostrademons mentioned. For example, Apache Spark on top of Scala does this pretty well (but it's significantly more complex than SQL is.) Pandas in Python and SAS also have many of these features (but also have a higher learning curve.)
biggio 8y ago
You need to think in bags of things

cr0sh 8y ago

I was fortunate that my early SE career experience involved a lot of SQL (and my first experience with a SQL-like query language happened under PICK). But as my career has gone forward, I'm touching it less and less; today, I hardly touch it at all outside of my personal usage. Much of that has to do with the fact that I'm now employed building and maintaining an SPA using javascript and nodejs where the backend is accessed thru a RESTful API; we never get to touch the actual database. The few times I have seen some queries for that DB - albeit not in our API, though I could probably find them somewhere - all I can hope is that the SQL engine being used does some kind of query optimization on-the-fly, because there's so many inner selects that make me cringe it ain't funny (like I wonder if they've heard of joins and such). Before, I was involved in a lot of PHP web apps and backend server automation, where I needed to use SQL a lot; I feel like I am getting rusty in it.

SatvikBeri 8y ago

You could make a language that had all those benefits + almost all the things nostrademons mentioned. For example, Apache Spark on top of Scala does this pretty well (but it's significantly more complex than SQL is.) Pandas in Python and SAS also have many of these features (but also have a higher learning curve.)

biggio 8y ago

You need to think in bags of things