[listenallyall]

SQL is hard not because of terrible syntax, but because the underlying logic of defining exactly what you want, is difficult.

SQL, while not perfect, is very compact and direct. It allows you to express what you want succinctly and without boilerplate. No classes, no variable declarations (sure you can DECLARE a variable, but it is rarely needed), no dependencies or imports.

There's a reason why, despite the promises of every BI tool that it will "simplify" your database and "empower users", none of them have toppled SQL or even added anything useful that SQL could incorporate.

Graphical query designers are nice but have limited capabilities. SQL could occasionally be less verbose and IDEs could probably do better in reducing keystrokes (better autocomplete), but SQL itself, overall, is pure and brilliant.

[Groxx]

Yeah - my class covered the language and meanings of the terms in a couple days. It's wonderfully simple. Which makes it hard in the same ways programming is hard - arrays are trivial! People still screw up bounds checks routinely!

Figuring out what you want, and understanding your data well enough to know what's viable and what's nonsense, is infinitely harder. And it changes every time.

Getting good at that part is "expertise" in a nutshell - gradually learning what strategies work and when, and getting better and better at your guesses. That takes more than a few weeks; that's an entire career.

[nojito]

> There's a reason why, despite the promises of every BI tool that it will "simplify" your database and "empower users", none of them have toppled SQL or even added anything useful that SQL could incorporate.

Pivoting data is still extremely painful using raw SQL

[listenallyall]

That's a semi-valid objection but I'd argue that's not really within the scope of SQL (and the PIVOT keyword is not an official part of the language, I believe). SQL is a language to interact with databases, SELECT queries are specifically for extracting data out of a database. Pivoting is typically something you do with data you've already extracted, that currently resides in memory, which is why it is fast, there's no additional data retrieval each time you change the aggregations or filters in a pivot table. Put it this way -- a SQL-based pivot table engine, that re-queries the database with every change, would perform awfully compared to a simple Excel PivotTable.

Similarly, you can't use SQL to apply color formatting to any of the result rows or values -- but that was never a goal SQL intended to achieve.

[CRConrad]

> and the PIVOT keyword is not an official part of the language

Yeah, that's probably a large part of the reason why pivoting data is such a pain in the backside.

[BenoitP]

> PIVOT

The postgres dialect has it IIRC.

[nmz]

and also because you have to pay to use Q and kdb+