Comment by nicktikhonov
7 days ago
and yet this was on the front page of hacker news for an entire day :D
it's all about friction. why spend minutes writing a query when you can spend 5 seconds speaking the result you want and get 90-100% of the way there.
Mostly because you don’t know if it’s correct unless you know SQL. It’s entirely too easy to get results that look correct but aren’t, especially when using windowing functions and the like.
But honestly, most queries I’ve ever seen are just simple joins, which shouldn’t take you 5 minutes to write.
> Mostly because you don’t know if it’s correct unless you know SQL. It’s entirely too easy to get results that look correct but aren’t ...
This is the fundamental problem when attempting to use "GenAI" to make program code, SQL or otherwise. All one would have to do is substitute SQL with language/library of choice above and it would be just as applicable.
Fully agree, I just harp on SQL because a. It’s my niche b. It always seems to be a “you can know this, but it doesn’t really matter” thing even for people who regularly interact with RDBMS, and it drives me bonkers.
> most queries I’ve ever seen are just simple joins
Good for you. Some of us deal with more complex queries, even if it may not seems so from the outside. For example getting hierarchical data based on parent_id, while having non-trivial conditions for the parents and the children or product search queries which need to use trigram functions with some ranking, depending on product availability across stores and user preferences.
I agree knowing SQL is still useful, but more for double checking the queries from LLMs than for trying to build queries yourself.
> getting hierarchical data based on parent_id
So, an adjacency list (probably, though there are many alternatives, which are usually better). That’s not complex, that’s a self-join.
> trigram functions
That’s an indexing decision, not a query. It’s also usually a waste: if you’re doing something like looking up a user by email or name, and you don’t want case sensitivity to wreck your plan, then use a case-insensitive collation for that column.
> I agree knowing SQL is still useful, but more for double checking the queries from LLMs
“I agree knowing Python / TypeScript / Golang is still useful, but more for double checking the queries from LLMs.” This sounds utterly absurd, because it is. Why SQL is seen as a nice-to-have instead of its reality - the beating heart of every company - is beyond me.
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