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My SQL knowledge is very limited - I had heard of HAVING but not GROUP BY CUBE or COALESCE - but one thing stood out: "The rewritten sql ... ran in a few seconds compared to over half an hour for the original query." I know there were four million rows in the dataset, but is 30 minutes the kind of run-time you would expect for a query like this?

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> I know there were four million rows in the dataset, but is 30 minutes the kind of run-time you would expect for a query like this?.

Clearly not since they got it down to a few seconds ;).

But tongue in cheek aside, it's incredibly dependent on what is in those 4M rows, how big they are, if they are indexed, whether you join in weird ways, whether the query planner does something unexpected.

SQL tooling is by and large pretty barbaric compared to most other tool these days, Intellij (and various spin off language specific IDE's) have the best tooling I've seen in that area but even then it's primitive.

I'd have to disagree with you on the tooling. Mature (especially commercial) SQL databases have a lot of great tooling built around them that inany areas surpass most of the language tools. For example, Extended events, which comes with SQL Server by default, allows you to trace/profile/filter hundreds of different events in real time, going from simple things like query execution tracing and going all the way to profiling locks, spinlocks, IO events and much more. There's (also built-in) another tool called Query Store that allows to track performance regressions, aggregate performance statistics etc. And then there's whole infrastructure of 3d party tools for things like execution plan analysis, capacity planning etc etc. Oracle has similar rich set of tools. Postgres is lacking some of those, but it's getting better. IDE support in JetBrains products is not that far away from, say, java experience, but from a pure coding perspective it's a bit behind.

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