Re: interface for "non-SQL people"

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.