[Discuss] SQL discussion

[markw at mohawksoft.com]

> On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 8:08 AM,  <markw at mohawksoft.com> wrote:
>> How much of this is a reluctance to learn SQL?
>
> Also, why do people who don't want to learn SQL seem fine learning
> other data access languages?
>

That's really not the question. SQL is a multi-vendor standard data access
language that scales from very small to very large.

If you were an engineer in charge of project that needed a data access
paradigm, wouldn't you feel obliged to learn the standard systems
available before you design? It is a crucial part of engineering to know
the options available and be able to weigh the pros and cons and choose
accordingly.

The thing about databases is that they are mature technology. Oracle,
Sybase (Micrsoft), PostgreSQL, sqlite, and others have been around for a
very long time and all more or less benefit from a history of research and
development into the data access theory. If you are trying to understand
and improve performance, you can almost certainly find a research paper on
it using your database of choice.

The "no-sql" offerings as well as the "roll-your-own" seldom, if ever,
make things easier or faster. I have written a few data/performance
intensive systems: A commercial high speed text search engine, a
commercial recommendations system, A high speed session manager for PHP as
well as some other apps, and there are times when SQL just isn't the right
tool, but it is the exception, not the rule. Even then, SQL was used on
the search engine and recommendations engine to fill in the gaps between
finding the data and presenting it to the next tier.  Even the PHP session
manager eventually had to be able to persist sessions to a SQL database.