[interleave]

I had a similar experience this month. We've been pair-programming using Dbt to write "long-form" SQL to bubble up a report to our business users.

After an initial "Uh-oh, I haven't manually written complex SQL in a while..." it all came back fast enough (Thanks, first-semester relational algebra!). Turns out, sql is well-suited for business "in-queries"!

The things that made us scratch our heads came from how the schema had evolved over time. We now have those hairballs at least 'contained' and visible. And it's all pretty readable imho.

I guess my initial unease came from using ORMs for CRUD persistence and very rare exploration. And holy moly, I'm grateful for ORMs. I wouldn't want to manually write those inserts and updates.

So, I guess it depends on what you want to accomplish with your database.

Btw: A HUGE shout-out to Dbt and Dbt cloud for letting us treat sql as code. Didn't expect to love it that much. How was this not a thing earlier?