SQL isn't really code though, its more like a specification of what you want. Working out how to actually get what you want is then (usually) the engine's probl

SQL isn't really code though, its more like a specification of what you want. Working out how to actually get what you want is then (usually) the engine's problem. And when you're describing precisely what you want from large datasets with lots of columns, its always going to look ugly. I'd wager that if you re-wrote those snippets as Ruby or Scala operating against something tabular like CSV files, with all the joins and aggregates and so on done in code, it would look uglier. * ok sometimes sql (thinking specifically of SELECT statements) gets code-y, e.g. with inline formulas. But generally its more on the specification side.