alt Hacker News > You can learn something like ~90% of useful SQL in an afternoon.
It's an ugly little language that one has to come back to and re-learn over and over at different levels of sophistication. Nothing wrong with that, but to suggest it's trivial is a gross mischaracterization.
Replies
bluefirebrand • yesterday at 6:35 PM
> different levels of sophistication
Most of those are not necessary for 90% of use cases
I'm not taking the piss either
All most people really need to know is table CRUD, row CRUD, and a bit about indices.
For anything more advanced you'll need a DBA, but IMO you unless you are scaling like crazy you will not need much more than that for SQL knowledge. It's really, really not that complex for most use cases
I’m a DBRE, and also happen to like SQL. With that as a disclaimer, I really do not think it’s a difficult language to learn. Learning the intricacies of your RDBMS’ behavior for various functions (like MySQL’s ORDER BY and GROUP BY optimizations) is complicated, but that’s what docs are for.