Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cyberax 303 days ago
> Engineers should be writing SQL, period.

Is it a variation of: "I suffered when I was young, so everyone must suffer as I did?"

SQL is terrible, however you slice it. It's a verbose bass-ackwards language. ORMs that remove the need to deal with SQL for 99% of trivial cases are great.

The rest 1% can remain painful.
1 comments
tucnak 302 days ago
Please stop spewing nonsense.

SQL remains the only way to efficiently perform MANY computations in the database precisely because it's lingua franca for the database planner. If you're not writing SQL, it doesn't mean that you're unable to cover 1% of the queries, it only means that you're leaving 99% of performance on the table. You can tell a bad programmer by their refusing to use views and materialized views. Not to mention normalisation! I'm yet to see a coder using ORM produce a sane schema. And don't get me started on aggregates. Relational databases represent relations, not objects, period.

link
cyberax 302 days ago
Please stop spewing nonsense.

> If you're not writing SQL, it doesn't mean that you're unable to cover 1% of the queries, it only means that you're leaving 99% of performance on the table.

Honestly? You're spewing bullshit. In most apps most of SQL is trivial. It's typically limited to simple joins (with indexes) with simple filters. Anything more complicated, and it's usually not suitable for OLTP. Heck, all our SQL is linted to not have full-table scans.

This kind of SQL is perfectly auto-generated by ORMs.

Those multi-page queries that required mystic DB knowledge for placing hints, burning incense, and paying $1000 per hour to Oracle consultants? They're entirely useless in modern software stacks. Because you can either keep the entire working set in RAM so these queries can be trivially rewritten, or you just won't use regular SQL for it.

> You can tell a bad programmer by their refusing to use views and materialized views.

You can tell a bad programmer by them using DB in a way that requires materialized views. It typically ends with moving app logic into SQL, and may even lead to "SELECT '<td>' + row.cust_name + '</td>'".

link