[jasonkester]

"I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join."

Wow.

Note to self: start asking candidates to write SQL in interviews.

It had just never occurred to me that people who spend their entire lives talking to databases wouldn't know how to talk to them directly.

And really, you can get pretty much any piece of information out of a database using just four keywords. It's the least memorization of any language in history. SELECT, FROM, WHERE, and for extra credit, LIKE. That's it. That'll get you any non-aggregate dataset you could want, joined or otherwise.

Learn IN and GROUP BY and you've got everything else you'll ever need for reporting. It's just the simplest language ever.

[Flemlord]

> Note to self: start asking candidates to write SQL in interviews.

Heh. Quite a few people (~20%) take the attitude of the parent poster, saying they're not solid on SQL since they've been using ORMs for a while. So I ask them to write the same select in LINQ or their ORM language of choice. Not a single one has been able to do it.

[vax_11]

> It had just never occurred to me that people who spend their entire lives talking to databases wouldn't know how to talk to them directly.

You're begging the question. Most people who use databases don't "spend their entire lives" talking to them.

Of course I've talked to databases "directly", tuned them, "alter"ed them, indexed them, replicated them, and so forth, but just happened to use logic at the application level instead of the SQL level for JOIN functionality.

[james2vegas]

Ok so hopefully the places where you used to work hired someone that wouldn't write horribly inefficient client-side code to join two tables together when its a SQL RDBMS, and sped up those applications|sites considerably.