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Comment by ASinclair

14 hours ago

I'm nearly guilty of this. I've been in industry for a bit over 10 years and I can barely write SQL. That's despite writing a bunch of queries by hand in my undergrad databases course. I almost never deal with databases myself outside of some ad-hoc queries.

3 comments

ASinclair

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phito  6 hours ago

Same here, mostly because I avoid it because I really do not like writing queries. Something about the syntax rubs me the wrong way, especially if I have to switch from MySQL/Postgres/MSSQL regularly. I'll use an ORM whenever I can, if performances do not matter.

  • mattmanser  3 hours ago

    It's because it's logically in the wrong order, it should be:

       FROM Users 
   WHERE Type = 'Foo'
   SELECT id, name

    They use the right order in a lot of ORMs and as I was a SQL expert (but not master), I found it so jarring at first.

    You probably have the reverse problem, it doesn't fit your mental model which is in fact the right logical model.

    It gets even worse when you add LIMIT/TOP or GROUP BY. SQL is great in a lot of ways, but logically not very consistent. And UPDATE now I think about it, in SQL Server you get this bizarreness:

        UPDATE u
    SET u.Type = 'Bar'
    FROM Users u
    JOIN Company c on u.companyId = c.id
    WHERE c.name = 'Baz'

    • skydhash  2 hours ago

      That's because in the relational model, you deal mostly in terms of projections. There's an action and then the rest of the statement is creating the projection of the data the action will apply to. The action always applies to the whole of the projection (IIRC).d

      The semantics of SQL and a standard programming language are quite different as they are based on different computing/data model.