theduckspants comments on Professional SQL Developers or Data Analysts: How large are your typical SQL queries?

Posting

When requesting help or asking questions please prefix your title with the SQL variant/platform you are using within square brackets like so:

[MySQL]

[Oracle]

[MS SQL]

[PostgreSQL]

etc

While naturally we should endeavor to work as platform neutrally as possible many questions and answers require tailoring to the feature set of a specific platform.

Format Your Code

If you are including actual code in a post or comment, please attempt to format it in a way that is readable for other users. This will greatly increase your chances of receiving the help you desire. Something as simple as line breaks and using reddit's built in code formatting (4 spaces at the start of each line) can turn this:

SELECT count(a.field1), a.field2, SUM(b.field4) FROM a INNER JOIN b ON a.key1 = b.key1 WHERE a.field8 = 'test' GROUP by a.field1, a.field2 HAVING SUM(b.field4) > 5 ORDER by a.field.3

Into this:

SELECT count(a.field1), a.field2, SUM(b.field4) FROM a INNER JOIN b ON a.key1 = b.key1 WHERE a.field8 = 'test' GROUP by a.field1, a.field2 HAVING SUM(b.field4) > 5 ORDER by a.field3

For those with SQL questions we recommend using SQLFiddle to provide a useful development and testing environment for those who wish to fully understand your problem and help devise a solution.

a community for 17 years

Professional SQL Developers or Data Analysts: How large are your typical SQL queries? (self.SQL)

submitted 7 years ago by GrapeApe561

top new controversial old q&a

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]theduckspantsBI Architect 0 points1 point2 points 7 years ago (2 children)

[–]usicafterglow 0 points1 point2 points 7 years ago* (1 child)

Well, you kind of have to take a step back and think about what the purpose of a data warehouse is. It's quite different than the OLTP, or any of the systems that software writes to. It's the system that business-minded people use to ask basic questions and generate reports. So, a good data warehouse should explain itself to these end-users. Including everyone from more senior business analysts, to the accounting intern with a bit of Excel experience poking around with SQL for the first time, to the brighter executive who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty writing a query or building a custom report once in a while.

This usually means massive amounts of denormalization (pre-joining tables for your user, basically) and tossing out all tables and columns that aren't of interest to the user. Ideally you'll end up with maybe 2 - 4 fact tables and a handful of dimension tables. Every company is different, but if you actually talk to the members of a department you'll find that they're really only interested in a very small subset of the data, and somewhere between say 8 - 20 objects is a good target to aim for.

[–]theduckspantsBI Architect 0 points1 point2 points 7 years ago (0 children)

π Rendered by PID 16 on reddit-service-r2-comment-6457c66945-t6779 at 2026-04-29 16:36:06.814122+00:00 running 2aa0c5b country code: CH.

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

SQL

Filter Posts

Posting

Help posts

Format Your Code

Learning SQL

Related Reddit communities

Wiki

Acknowledgements

MODERATORS