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by golergka 3663 days ago
> "never mind 5 years of claimed SQL experience at a big company" - you can easily have that without touching JOIN.

Most of my experience with SQL comes from being a game designer with access to analytics database - so, not exactly a lot.

But how the hell would you not touch join even a single time while working with SQL for 5 years?!

1 comments

Two ways I can think of off the top of my head:

1. Total reliance on ORMs, and never actually touching SQL (or not in 5 years since you started using ORMs)

2. Not building complex relational schemas with related items that you use SQL to pull in results of combined data that follows those relationships.

I'd wager #1 is the more common case.

Or they're just using a bunch of SELECT * WHERE X queries and then filtering the results in their favorite programming language
This. With smaller amounts of data it's not even a big deal. Just pull everything into python or R and subset in there.
That, too.
But in #1 you're not working with SQL, you're working with a layer above it.

And wouldn't even the most basic data, properly normalized, require joins? I mean - learning about database normalization is one of the first things you're supposed to do when you work with relational databases, right?