Re: interface for "non-SQL people"

On Fri, 9 Oct 2009, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-10-08 at 19:16 -0600, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Merlin Moncure <mmoncure(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > >
> > > The #1 tool you have at your disposal is the human brain. I
> > > personally think GUI database tools are counter productive and huge
> > > time wasters. SQL requires lateral thinking but once you have your
> > > head around how joins work and the general syntax of queries you
> > > should have no problem getting data out of your database. SQL is a
> > > 'man machine interface' :-). It's a very high level language with a
> > > lot of power. The gui 'wrappers' that I've seen actually obfuscate
> > > the concepts.
> >
> > Amen to that. I'd rather spend a little bit of my time each week
> > going over correlated subqueries with a user than trying to get good
> > performance on a reporting server that's hammered by bad queries.
> > Which is what a lot of query builders basically do.
>
> Good lord people. Not be helpful much?
> [...]
> JD... Who sits in bewilderment

I'm fairly bewildered as well. I mean, why would someone who is emailing
with an address from a company that presumably should care about how it
looks on the mailing list bother to prefix his answer to a question with
what amounts to an attack on other people in the thread. It'd be a bit
odd, but understandable if the message was an attack only on the answers,
but is just baffling when it effectively includes attacks on the people.