Re: interface for "non-SQL people"

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Stephan Szabo
<sszabo(at)megazone(dot)bigpanda(dot)com> wrote:
> 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.

In fairness to jd, the OP asked: "what is the best form of 'x'", and I
responded: 'y'! While he is still (naturally) wrong, I don't think
his statement reflects at all badly to himself or his company. Quite
the opposite in fact, it was rather helpful.

It's only natural that because I've made it one of my life's goals to
annoyingly gripe about how use of GUI query design tools (and their
evil cousin, the ERD), has decayed the principles and general welfare
of database development, I should only expect to get poked a bit here
and there.

merlin