Re: Thoughts on "Love Your Database"

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 7:55 AM, Szymon Lipiński <mabewlun(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
​<snip>​

> Hi,
> at my previous jobs I was working with many programmers, and almost none
> of them understood SQL. The problem was even deeper. They didn't want to
> learn it. When I was working among java programmers, I noticed that they
> hated SQL, but there was no problem with learning HQL, which in fact is
> quite similar. I really have no idea why it is like that.
>
> I was thinking about such a book too, I have even started writing that,
> but the whole set of ideas was always either too large or was a copy of
> what can be found in other, general programming books. And if programmers
> don't want to read the other books, and learn basics of SQL from there,
> then the whole idea seemed useless to me. Of course the other reason of not
> writing the book was lack of time, as writing a good book requires enormous
> amount of work.
>
> On the other hand I think that the huge problem with programmers and SQL
> is changing the mindset. A standard programmer usually has a problem with
> thinking in sets. Instead she usually thinks in terms of loops, and objects.
>

​Very true. What _really_ was of help to me was the fact that I had learned
APL in college. APL is an vector / array oriented language with operators
which work on entire data structures, rather than individual array
elements. E.g. to sum all the number in a vector is simply "+/vector".

>
> When I was giving talks about what not to do in databases, people were
> either not interested or everything was a surprise for them, even for quite
> experienced programmers. However after such a talk, or a training, people
> were still not interested in knowing more, but they were happily learning
> about programming.
>
> I think it would be great to have a book like that, and I think it should
> not be only about Postgres. But here is the problem I had with this
> concept: to describe all the things to a normal programmer, assuming she
> will be interested, it will need to be quite a huge and complicated book.
>
> Or maybe this book should be about something else, start from an ORM, and
> show how to translate it to much better SQL, as ORMs are the things
> programmers usually understand, and they really don't bother that using
> them can be a bad idea.
>
>
> --
> regards Szymon Lipiński
>

​What I have heard of are shops in which the application programmers simply
DO NOT CODE any SQL. They only use stored procedures which they view as
subroutine calls. The stored procedures are written by the DBAs and other
SQL experts. That group has hard control over the enterprise data. If the
programmers need something, they become like end-user in that they simply
describe what data they need and why. The programmers basically know enough
to be able to ask for something. Completely unlike back in the days of
indexed (DBM basically) files​.

--
The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our
certitude.

Maranatha! <><
John McKown