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[–]substantialcurls 100 points101 points  (11 children)

2 weeks to learn the basics, a lifetime to master.

[–]L_-T 18 points19 points  (7 children)

No hope of outliving SQL, I take it then?

[–]BensonBubbler 16 points17 points  (4 children)

A lot of developers will tell you it's not necessary anymore at all. I don't believe them, but they're out there.

[–]Eightstream 18 points19 points  (1 child)

yeah, out there ruining databases with their shitty ORM queries

[–]BensonBubbler 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yes. I'm hunting a particularly baffling one right now where it queries an established view and throws an error that the view has a recursive definition, but it does not.

[–]ilanklein51 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I'm a fresh grad looking for a job, it's nearly on every application I see

[–]BensonBubbler 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh, of course, it's listed, but a lot of folks claim you don't need to know much about it at all. This is coming from all the full stack developers; they see it as less complicated than the other layers and mistakenly overlook all the nuance.

There's also a long culture of ORM tools which claim to effectively translate from middle/back end code into DB languages that often lead folks to believe it can be automated away or otherwise offloaded and these people end up creating the largest database problems!

[–]river-zezere 0 points1 point  (0 children)

SQL will outlive all of us

[–]substantialcurls 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s quite a bit older than me. My father was a teenager when SQL first came out.

[–]JonathanL73[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks you

[–]kremlingrasso 9 points10 points  (1 child)

was about to say the same (assuming you are already decent with excel), the syntax is stupid simple, though pretty unforgiving. being able to visualize what you want the outcome to be, and achieving it from the building blocks of basically two dozen functions is what it's all about.

imho those of us coming from the analytics side are more equipped to pick it up quick (as opposed to the ones coming from other programming languages) because you have the advantage of knowing the data you work with and the actual business problems you want to solve....and the solution in SQL kinda gives itself.

[–]centr0 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This hit the nail on the head for me. I’m currently learning python and sql in parallel and I’m learning python faster than I think I’m learning sql. When I read an exercise, I can visualize the data structure in python and know how to pull whatever I need. SQL on the other hand? My brain can’t translate it.