[halfcat]

> Engineers should be writing SQL, period.

As another commenter wrote:

”If you're doing OLAP…SQL isn't wholly adequate for this, it's hard work to get the SQL right and if there's joins involved it's not hard to accidentally fan out and start double counting.”

I feel this in my bones. Anytime someone in the business changes something in a source system, the joins create extra rows. Trying to address this with SQL is like plowing a field with a spoon.

And I don’t think ORMs are the answer. Just imperative code. The ability to throw in a few lines of sanity checking outside of SQL is such a massive boost to reliability and data quality, when the source systems are moving underneath your feet.

[tucnak]

In my experience, LATERAL is a massive quality-of-life improvement when it comes to double-counting specifically; where a normal subquery is not possible, a correlated subquery in FROM is much nicer than a CTE+JOIN.

Doubleagree on sanity checks.