As I've seen on HN, a lot of people hate and do not think in SQL, and avoid it by writing something imperative. Replacing a loop with one query is an example of

As I've seen on HN, a lot of people hate and do not think in SQL, and avoid it by writing something imperative. Replacing a loop with one query is an example of the sort of thing that I've seen make 3 orders of magnitude difference. Another basic pattern is converting a program or script that loads a whole job into memory into something with fixed size buffers, because specific data made the original explode.