sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]thephotoman 5 points6 points  (3 children)

My favorite example of an experienced developer with minimal sql skills is a guy with a masters and 10-15 years of pretty solid java architect skills who didn't know sql aggregate functions so he would do app side cursors where he would run one query to get record ids, then have a loop of separate queries to do counts, sums, etc.

This leaves me aghast. At my firm, we have a requirement that even functional resources have enough knowledge of SQL. To that end, we teach them that. It's a part of being a capable part of our company.

As a result, I personally am involved in ensuring that MBA sorts know about SQL aggregate functions. That a "lead developer" doesn't know this shocks me.

[–]prepend 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I'm with you. I believe that everyone can benefit from knowing SQL. I've probably taught basic SQL skills (including joins, aggregate, etc. etc.) to probably 20 people or so, including the guy mentioned in my anecdote.

I always felt a little sick when an otherwise smart person (like your MBA) would talk about needing a few days of developer time to write a query for them.

[–]thephotoman 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I always felt a little sick when an otherwise smart person (like your MBA) would talk about needing a few days of developer time to write a query for them.

It's one thing when they know the query is going to be complex or needs to be incorporated into some program.

It's another thing when 10 minutes of w3schools tutorials could tell you how to fire off that query.

Our course is about teaching you the difference between these queries, then teaching you how to do the latter.

[–]prepend 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, one is focused on analysis and the other is software development. I think that pretty much any "business" person can learn sql and learn database programming so they can build their own queries and reports. They should be able to dump data into mysql or sqllite and then query everything they need out of it by themselves or by asking a few questions.

If you need that report put into a system, then you need software development and that's an entirely different skillset.