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Comment by kiyoto | Hacker News Reader

SQL is scary.

I've talked to hundreds of customer prospects for Treasure Data, and by far the biggest surprise I encountered is how few people know their way around SQL. I am not talking about just "business" people but also programmers.

Contrast this dearth of SQL-proficient population with the massive, massive Excel user base: I jokingly tell my friends that Excel is by far the most popular programming language =p

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Much of the ORM market and NoSQL were precisely because programmers don't understand SQL.

True that.

I use SQL extensively, and never run into all these problems other people run into.

I also don't use ORM. there's so much you can do well and fast with SQL.

(I've also seen dreadful abominations in sql, like stored procedures that dynamically generate code for pivot tables... wait, that was me who did that)

That, and typing "select x from table A, table B where tableA.foreign_key = tableB.index and tableA.index=5" is a little long-winded and more prone to error, when you can just do x = ModelA.objects.get(pk=5).ModelB

SELECT B.x FROM tableA A JOIN tableB B on A.foreign_key = B.index WHERE A.index = 5

That's very simple, if you know SQL.

I think

Access actually has (or had, it's been a long time) a very well put together visual query designer. As long as you weren't doing anything crazy you'd never need to touch SQL.

Not true. As soon as you go just a little step further, your query cannot be represented by the GUI stuff anymore.

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