Re:SQL: One of the most valuable skills
by michaelt on Wednesday February 13, 2019 @06:11AM
(#19152158)
When people say "SQL" they often refer to a bunch of concepts, some better than others, all bundled together.
SQL gets you tables and joins, sure. But it also gets you queries that (some) non-programmers can write, outputs that are always a table, a variety of GUI programs to compose queries and display the results, analytic functions to do things like find percentiles, and tools to connect from MS Excel. And it often means you get transactions, ACID compliance, compound indexes, explicit table schemas, multiple join types, arbitrary-precision decimal data types, constraints, views, and a statistics-based query optimiser.
Of course it also gets you weird null handling, stored procedures, and triggers.
SQL gets you tables and joins, sure. But it also gets you queries that (some) non-programmers can write, outputs that are always a table, a variety of GUI programs to compose queries and display the results, analytic functions to do things like find percentiles, and tools to connect from MS Excel. And it often means you get transactions, ACID compliance, compound indexes, explicit table schemas, multiple join types, arbitrary-precision decimal data types, constraints, views, and a statistics-based query optimiser.
Of course it also gets you weird null handling, stored procedures, and triggers.