4 ms·

Popular myth. Definitely. There is hardly anything as beautiful and simple as SQL.

by jsemrau 12y ago

Amezarak 12y ago
Agreed. Years ago, when I took a database class in college, I hated it. Several years later, I began working at a consulting firm on the support team. My primarily role was defect/enhancement tracking and resolution in the product we had developed for them as well as their satellite apps. The first time I really got my hands dirty with SQL was pulling out a bunch of VBA and Access "SQL" they were using to generate reports and to rewrite it into real SQL so it could be run on the backend, which cut times down from hours to milliseconds. It was okay (I'd hate those queries now) but it's where I really picked it up. Then the same client started calling me to write (or edit) queries to pull out some information from their database I don't think anyone had anticipated they'd ever need. That's when I started to really appreciate how beautiful and expressive SQL can be. Stop thinking imperatively - SQL will let you do it but don't. No cursors unless you absolutely have to do. You probably don't. Dynamic SQL has its place, but try to stay away from that too. There are a few queries I still remember with some fondness. One was to determine the number of days particular classes of employees worked on particular classes of projects. Unfortunately, the way their data was modeled made this not-at-all obvious - and the date information was stored in the "start" and "end" date type fields. There was a lot more to it, but after pulling my hair out - the customer generally needed these in under half an hour - I suddenly realized I could use a recursive CTE to generate a dataset of all days that I could use to join with, filter out any duplicates, and then use aggregation functions to get what I needed. There were a lot of other details because of the complexity of their model, but it worked and it just seemed so elegant at the end. I've moved on to another job now and honestly, writing SQL is what I miss most. I would have never pictured myself saying that before I worked there.

Popular myth. Definitely. There is hardly anything as beautiful and simple as SQL.

by jsemrau 12y ago

Popular myth. Definitely. There is hardly anything as beautiful and simple as SQL.

Agreed. Years ago, when I took a database class in college, I hated it. Several years later, I began working at a consulting firm on the support team. My primarily role was defect/enhancement tracking and resolution in the product we had developed for them as well as their satellite apps. The first time I really got my hands dirty with SQL was pulling out a bunch of VBA and Access "SQL" they were using to generate reports and to rewrite it into real SQL so it could be run on the backend, which cut times down from hours to milliseconds. It was okay (I'd hate those queries now) but it's where I really picked it up. Then the same client started calling me to write (or edit) queries to pull out some information from their database I don't think anyone had anticipated they'd ever need. That's when I started to really appreciate how beautiful and expressive SQL can be. Stop thinking imperatively - SQL will let you do it but don't. No cursors unless you absolutely have to do. You probably don't. Dynamic SQL has its place, but try to stay away from that too. There are a few queries I still remember with some fondness. One was to determine the number of days particular classes of employees worked on particular classes of projects. Unfortunately, the way their data was modeled made this not-at-all obvious - and the date information was stored in the "start" and "end" date type fields. There was a lot more to it, but after pulling my hair out - the customer generally needed these in under half an hour - I suddenly realized I could use a recursive CTE to generate a dataset of all days that I could use to join with, filter out any duplicates, and then use aggregation functions to get what I needed. There were a lot of other details because of the complexity of their model, but it worked and it just seemed so elegant at the end. I've moved on to another job now and honestly, writing SQL is what I miss most. I would have never pictured myself saying that before I worked there.