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• How much SQL is enough? (Score:1)

  by dlc (50)

  With SQL, you can get very far with limited knowledge. In my experience, for general database usage, you don't need to know much beyond natural joins (maybe left joins, sometimes) and basic agregate functions to get many jobs done. I guess it's kind of like Perl in that way.

  Is there a way to teach "SQL"? Is there a fully (and only) ANSI-SQL compliant RDBMS that can be used as a teaching system, without having to learn vendor-specific details? While such a system might be less useful in the real world (v

  --
  (darren)
  • Re:How much SQL is enough? (Score:2)

    by ziggy (25) on 2003.04.02 9:21 (#18672) Journal

    With SQL, you can get very far with limited knowledge. In my experience, for general database usage, you don't need to know much beyond natural joins (maybe left joins, sometimes) and basic agregate functions to get many jobs done

    I agree.

    There are times when you need stored procs and triggers in your database. But those are easily part of the 80% of SQL that's necessary about 20% of the time. You can get around the need for those features by using DBI or some other programmatic interface into the database. Sure, it's not a purist's solution, but hell, it gets the job done. Basic SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE with joins and aggregates do most of what you need.

    Before I saw an SQL tutorial on the arcane corners, I'd like to see an SQL tutorial on the nasty gotchas. Things like misformulating a join and getting a product of MxN rows instead of an intersection. Or perhaps a walkthorugh on 3rd normal form and how it actually helps (and how denormalizing a database actually makes things simpler).

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