Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Technically, SQL is case-insensitive.
Practically, you want to capitalise the commands anyway.
It gives your code some gravitas. Always remember that when you're writing SQL statements you're speaking Ancient Words of Power.
Does that JavaScript framework that got invented 2 weeks ago by some snot-nosed kid need Words of Power? No. Does the database that has been chugging on for decades upon decades need Words of Power? Yes. Words of Power and all the due respect.
Reminds me a bit of Skyrim. You are... the query-born.
I'm going to print this out and frame it on the wall of my office.
SeLEct uSERnaMe frOm usERs WhErE fiRStnAmE = 'John';
UM ACKSHULLY SQL ISN'T CASE SENSITIVE ☝️🤓
Please tell that to the git overlords at my work. They won't approve a merge with even a single unnecessary capitalization.
The phrase "SQL programmers" is so fucking weird. SQL isn't a programming language. It's a query language. You don't "program" things with SQL. You utilize SQL as a component of programs for data insertion and lookup, but the actual logic of execution is done in a programming language. Unless you're doing Oracle PL/SQL, in which case why are you giving money to Oracle?
Edit: Damn, this comment made people mad.
Your knowledge of data engineering may be limited. SQL is predominant in data processing nowadays. FOSS tools such as DBT allows to write efficient data processing pipelines with SQL and some YAML config without the need for a general purpose coding language.
Why would anyone want that? Because SQL has the interesting property of describing the result you want rather than describing how to compute it. So you can put inside the database, a query engine with decades of optimizations, that will make a much better job at finding the best execution plan than the average developer.
It also means it's easier to train people for data processing nowadays.
Most database engines support stored procedures. You don't need to give money to oracle, you can give it to Microsoft instead.
Or not at all? Postgres? MariaDB? I think I missed the /s. I'm slow hah
Yes, those work :-) giving money to MS was more of a joke.
T-SQL is turing complete. While the MS SQL server has limitations on OS level operations, if you allow yourself some leeway with CLR wrappers for the win32 API, there's no reason I can think of you wouldn't be able to get the database engine to be a webserver reacting to incoming requests on port 80, or drawing GUIs based off of table state.
It's be slow and terrible, but doable.
It's doable. Personal experience
This doesn't make sense to me. SPs and functions are in every major database. If I wrote a bash script that runs like a program, and sounds like a program, did I program it? Script it?
And lots of systems have nested logic in the DB, optimization often leads to that to reduce overhead. Unless you're being lazy with an ORM like prisma that can't even join properly.
Getting high performing queries is just as difficult as any other programming language, and should be treated as such. Even Lemmy's huge performance increases to .18ish came from big PG optimizations.
It seems to be about yelling at others that "you're not a real programmer!!!" mixed with being so "technically correct" my eyes can no longer roll the same way they used to.
You don't "program" things with SQL
Why not? It sounds like you haven't written any OLAP queries :)
I've written ETL data pipelines using a system similar to Apache Airflow, where most of the logic is in SQL (either Presto or Apache Spark) with small pieces of Python to glue things together. Queries that are thousands of lines long that take ~30 minutes to run and do all sorts of transformations to the data. They run once per day, overnight. I'd definitely call that programming.
Most database systems support stored procedures, which are just like functions - you give them some input and they give you some output and/or perform some side effects.
MS SQL Server has this thing called Replication. It's a feature to keep tables in sync between databases, and even database servers. There's merge replication (two way), snapshot replication (one way scheduled publishing), and transaction replication (one way live-ish publishing).
And the logic is all implemented in T-SQL stored procedures.
I fucking hate it.
As a senior query writer, I use caps for begin and end and some other commands, but all caps makes my head hurt. It's like the sql is screaming at me. I think it's more important to have good looking queries with proper indentation.
This.
Highlight important aspects of the worry with caps
Writing SQL on Mac sucks so bad. I hate their caps lock time out
macOS has a caps lock timeout? The fuck...
Timeout was the wrong word. It has to be held for like a quarter second or something like that. It's annoying as hell.
MySQL gives you a half-hearted "Bye" when you exit the console.
My favourite MySQL error is "MySQL server has gone away", like MySQL decides "nah I don't want to run this" and runs off.
(it happens when no data is sent over the connection for a while, like if the query is taking too long to run and times out)
I know a Perl programmer who exclusively writes all SQL in pure lowercase with atypical indentation.
He's also a die-hard InfoWars follower, apparently his go to source, so... maybe there is a connection there.
Unlawful chaotic evil
Wait, you guys aren't just writing code and then hitting the FORMAT button?
THANKS, NOW I DON'T HAVE TO HOLD DOWN THE SHIFT KEY WHEN I TYPE ANYMORE!
If you guys think that's cool you should see what I can do with a double negative.
Nobody knows (/s) but you don't have to write keywords in upper case (for most DB's default settings anyway).
You can even write them sarcastically like this:
sElEcT * fRoM dUaL
MAKING SQL QUERIES IN CAPITAL LETTERS MAKES DATABASE TO SENSE URGENCY AND RUN FASTER.
It's tabs vs spaces for SQL. Notice how I capped.
I stopped doing SQL (the language/syntax) because I use ORMs now. They make the job a bit easier, especially when doing table relations.
The mental gymnastics needed to understand joins 😂
It's basically just a VLOOKUP is how I explain it to my friends who might be familiar with excel but not a real database.
If you know vlookup, you should checkout xlookup. Even more similar, relatively speaking of course. No longer do I have to count my columns
