To be honest, it’s remarkably simple for what it’s doing. There’s a ton of details that are abstracted away. Databases are massively complex things, yet we can write simple queries to interact with them, with semantics that are well-understood and documented. I think, like anything else, it requires a bit of effort to learn (not a lot, though). Once you do, it’s pretty easy to use. I’ve seen many non-technical people learn enough to write one-off queries for their own purposes, which I think is a testament to its simplicity.
Oneliners are simple I give that to you, but then you have those incomplete tables and whatnot. Like take all entries from A and join B on A.id and B.id, set the result to some default if B doesn’t exist.
You are surely going to whip up a perfect string of SQL but I’d struggle.
SELECT a.*, COALESCE(b.some_col, 'some_default_val') as b_result
FROM a LEFTJOIN b ON (a.id = b.id);
This will produce at least 1 row for every row in a, and if a.id doesn’t match any b.id, the value of b_result will be 'some_default_val'.
Not sure if that’s exactly what you were describing (since it was a little ambiguous), but that’s how I interpreted it.
Ultimately it’s just a matter of investing a little time to learn it. It’s not fundamentally difficult or complex, even though you certainly can write very complex queries.
Thanks, I will kot forget that the next time I have to do SQL!
Still wild there are no simpler language that have grown in popilarity for databases though.
To be honest, it’s remarkably simple for what it’s doing. There’s a ton of details that are abstracted away. Databases are massively complex things, yet we can write simple queries to interact with them, with semantics that are well-understood and documented. I think, like anything else, it requires a bit of effort to learn (not a lot, though). Once you do, it’s pretty easy to use. I’ve seen many non-technical people learn enough to write one-off queries for their own purposes, which I think is a testament to its simplicity.
Oneliners are simple I give that to you, but then you have those incomplete tables and whatnot. Like take all entries from A and join B on A.id and B.id, set the result to some default if B doesn’t exist.
You are surely going to whip up a perfect string of SQL but I’d struggle.
Heh yeah that’s pretty straightforward:
SELECT a.*, COALESCE(b.some_col, 'some_default_val') as b_result FROM a LEFT JOIN b ON (a.id = b.id);This will produce at least 1 row for every row in
a, and ifa.iddoesn’t match anyb.id, the value ofb_resultwill be'some_default_val'.Not sure if that’s exactly what you were describing (since it was a little ambiguous), but that’s how I interpreted it.
Ultimately it’s just a matter of investing a little time to learn it. It’s not fundamentally difficult or complex, even though you certainly can write very complex queries.