In four weeks I've gone from not remembering the difference between inner and outer joins to isolating a bug in the Postgres optimizer... and yeah, it's all abo

In four weeks I've gone from not remembering the difference between inner and outer joins to isolating a bug in the Postgres optimizer... and yeah, it's all about daily experience. I have no formal CS schooling, so thinking in sets is far from basic - I often have to stop myself from thinking in iteration. Reading Celko's "Thinking in SQL" book is in fact helpful (although why does he keep yelling at me? and what's FORTRAN?) But it's very foreign and black-box-y to many programmers, and a tiny bit of SQL voodoo, like a tiny bit of Javascript voodoo, will get you a very long way with very poor performance.