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by icebraining
2481 days ago
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> Yes, you can always describe your equations with English prose—and if you're doing simple addition and subtraction, it's probably nicer to write that in English. But once you want to do anything remotely complex, writing it as a math equation is more terse and less ambiguous. Right! But 99% of the time, I do not want to do something complex - I just want to load a few rows based on simple search parameters, and save a changed values (which may involve heavy data processing, but not relational). Hence only using SQL rarely, and therefore getting rusty. |
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That said, based on my experience analysing applications, "loading a few rows" to perform "heavy data processing" and then "save a changed value" smells suspiciously like "the entire task can be rewritten as a single, moderate complexity query and the data never even had to leave the database server."
I'm not saying that's the case in your own generic hypothetical, as there are indeed forms of business logic and advanced manipulations that exceed the scope of a database server. But you might be amazed at what you can do within the SQL language. For example if you aren't intimately familiar with window functions like DENSE_RANK() then do yourself a favour and learn about those—and then contemplate how you could use them within a subquery joined to a table that you're updating.