Fun with SQL
I’m pleased to announce next week’s meeting as: Fun With SQL. SQL is a strange language — strange enough that most programmers learn only enough to get by. This technique is enough for the casual hacker to land a job, but leaves much of SQL’s power underused. Given a sufficiently complex task, the same hacker will spend hours trying to write a workable query, only to end up with something that takes three days to complete, or to give up entirely and write the logic into application-side code. We’ll talk about why that’s a bad thing, and what to do about it. We’ll cover some SQL techniques most people overlook, from the simple to the advanced, and demonstrate some of the applications of these more complex queries.
eggyknap, known in meatspace as Josh Tolley, is a database administrator by day and, time permitting, a PostgreSQL hacker by night, who infrequently publishes items of occasional value at http://eggyknap.blogspot.com.