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Not sure if article saying something too deep for me to comprehend or too trivial not to be obvious to me.
by NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
Not sure if article saying something too deep for me to comprehend or too trivial not to be obvious to me.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoIt's the second one.
- davidivadavid 5y ago"Because it is code?"
- sokoloff 5y agoExactly. “Why Google treats Javascript like code and you should too” would seem equally plausible as an article.
- newlisp 5y agoYes, it was that bad of an article.
- castlecrasher2 5y agoIt's obvious to me and I imagine most programmers, too. However, as a data engineer I've been at some companies that treat SQL differently and seen bad practices that I believe the article is addressing, like putting SQL statements as stored procedures or materialized views instead of in git.
- xupybd 5y agoI didn't understand the point about stored procedures. Why not have stored procedures? Yes, you treat it like code any changes to the stored procedure are scripted, stored in git and deployed with a data migration tool. But store procedures give you a single place to call SQL. If there is a procedure that does a standard calculation used by 5 reports then put it in a function or a stored procedure and have every report call that procedure / function.
- fragmede 5y agoFrom the outside looking in, and when framed this way, it's obvious. But when SQL at a company is entered into a semi-bespoke internal system fronted by a textentry box on a webform, and there's no editor or git anywhere to be seen, it's less obvious that the work required to get it into a version control system like the rest of the code is even possible, never mind worth it. Especially when the data science team has a primarily statistics background and less of a programmer one. (even then, a programmer background doesn't imply a person knows git/version control.)
- acdha 5y agoIt’s obvious to most programmers - this was common practice in the previous century - but there’s been a spike of data scientist/analyst jobs where that might not be as common, and there used to be more of a subset of DBAs who self-identified as not being programmers and avoided “hard” things like this. I’ve definitely had people in roles like marketing have to deal with confusion or bugs caused by reports changing in undocumented ways.
- karmakaze 5y agoI think the gap is that most startup types don't use stored procedures, so their SQL is committed to version control by default. Few places do migrations to update their database in any way including the stored procedures that also works well. Nothing new, except for those not already doing one of these things.