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SQL feels to me like bash or regular expressions. You can do amazing things if you do it full time. But if you do it only a few times per month or year you qui

SQL feels to me like bash or regular expressions. You can do amazing things if you do it full time. But if you do it only a few times per month or year you quickly forget all the subtleties and it gets hard to understand even the stuff you wrote half a year ago. I guess in the end things have become so complex that as a dev you can’t be good at everything. I often wish there were dedicated database guys but if you have one usually that person is sysadmin and won’t help much with coding against the database.

rurp 7y ago
This echos my experience. I've written some complicated SQL queries, but I do it rarely enough that I always have to re-learn a lot of it. There have been a number of instances where I have had to look something up seemingly for the first time, found a good Stack Overflow answer, and then chuckled to myself because I had already upvoted that exact answer at some point in the past. SQL queries are a pretty common source of this, along with uncommon git and terminal commands.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Very true about git. I would add C++ to that lis. Done full time it’s super powerful. But later or with less experience you look at the code and think “WTF?” .
Noumenon72 7y ago
Common table expressions were all I needed to write <a href="https://modern-sql.com/use-case/literate-sql">literate https://modern-sql.com/use-case/literate-sql">literate SQL</a> and make it perfectly readable when I come back. But I was doing it almost full time so I wasn't forgetting much either.
tcgv 7y ago
I tend to disagree, since I find SQL orders of magnitude more intuitive than regular expressions, having no problem picking it up once every couple of months without requiring to fallback on books or cheat sheets for implementing the majority of queries. Sure, every now and then we have to optimize a query or implement a complex data extraction pattern forcing us to study how to do it, but for me this is unusual. The key aspect of SQL that makes it easy for me is readability. Once you know the basics you can understand what a query is doing just by looking at it. Regular expressions notation on the other hand are really though to read, and indeed I keep always forgetting its syntax.

rurp 7y ago

This echos my experience. I've written some complicated SQL queries, but I do it rarely enough that I always have to re-learn a lot of it. There have been a number of instances where I have had to look something up seemingly for the first time, found a good Stack Overflow answer, and then chuckled to myself because I had already upvoted that exact answer at some point in the past. SQL queries are a pretty common source of this, along with uncommon git and terminal commands.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Very true about git. I would add C++ to that lis. Done full time it’s super powerful. But later or with less experience you look at the code and think “WTF?” .

Noumenon72 7y ago

Common table expressions were all I needed to write <a href="https://modern-sql.com/use-case/literate-sql">literate https://modern-sql.com/use-case/literate-sql">literate SQL</a> and make it perfectly readable when I come back. But I was doing it almost full time so I wasn't forgetting much either.

tcgv 7y ago

I tend to disagree, since I find SQL orders of magnitude more intuitive than regular expressions, having no problem picking it up once every couple of months without requiring to fallback on books or cheat sheets for implementing the majority of queries. Sure, every now and then we have to optimize a query or implement a complex data extraction pattern forcing us to study how to do it, but for me this is unusual. The key aspect of SQL that makes it easy for me is readability. Once you know the basics you can understand what a query is doing just by looking at it. Regular expressions notation on the other hand are really though to read, and indeed I keep always forgetting its syntax.