Today’s Top Tech Skills

Re:Today’s Top Tech Skills by FpUser on Sunday November 24, 2019 @12:23PM (#21621824)

My use of SQL beyond very basic is very sporadic (I do remember about HAVING though). If you ask me out of blue I would most likely fail tests. From time to time however I do have to design database for particular product and in a matter of few days my knowledge gets from basic to very good one. Only to go down again a short while after database design implementation and testing completes.

That does not mean that I do not know basic concepts about how different databases work, including underlying storage engines etc. To the point that for one product I personally designed actual NoSQL (EAV to be precise) database engine and query engine largely resembling SQL to go along.

So would you fail me in your test?

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Re:Today’s Top Tech Skills by freedomben on Sunday November 24, 2019 @01:45PM (#21622375)

Exactly. You don't use it, you lose it. That doesn't mean you don't have the capacity to reacquire it in a short period should you need it again. Most humans are not encyclopedias.

I can describe for you in detail the different index types on MySQL and Postgres, and go into when/why you would use each. But it's been so long since I crafted a complex join by hand I would definitely have to google it. However I don't doubt that I could write the query in a short time. One of the most realistic interviews I ever had, they gave me a laptop and allowed me to google during my answer. I took the job.

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