<story><title>SQL: One of the most valuable skills</title><url>http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2019/02/12/sql-most-valuable-skill/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slap_shot</author><text>SQL is one the most amazing concepts I&amp;#x27;ve ever experienced. It&amp;#x27;s nearly 5 decades old and there is no sign of a replacement. We&amp;#x27;ve created countless other technologies to store and process data, and we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those technologies (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc).&lt;p&gt;I run a early stage company that builds analytics infrastructure for companies. We are betting very heavily on SQL, and Craigs post rings true now more than ever.&lt;p&gt;Increasingly, more SQL is written in companies by analysts and data scientists than typical software engineers.&lt;p&gt;The advent of the MMP data warehouse (redshift, bigquery, snowflake, etc) has given companies with even the most limited budget the ability to warehouse and query an enormous amount of data just using SQL. SQL is more powerful and valuable today than it ever has been.&lt;p&gt;When you look into a typical organization, most software engineers aren&amp;#x27;t very good at SQL. Why should they be? Most complex queries are analytics queries. ORMs can handle a majority of the basic functions application code needs to handle.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps going against Craig&amp;#x27;s point is the simple fact that we&amp;#x27;ve abstracted SQL away from a lot of engineers across the backend and certainly frontend and mobile. You can be a great developer and not know a lot about SQL.&lt;p&gt;On the other end of the spectrum are the influx of &amp;quot;data engineers&amp;quot; with basic to intermediate knowledge of HDFS, streaming data or various other NoSQL technologies. They often know less about raw SQL than even junior engineers because SQL is below their high-power big data tools.&lt;p&gt;But if you really understand SQL, and it seems few people truly today, you command an immense amount of power. Probably more than ever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>&amp;quot;we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those languages (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc).&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is largely because of the number of non-programmers who know SQL.  Add an SQL layer on top of your non-SQL database and you instantly open up a wide variety of reporting &amp;amp; analytics functionality to PMs, data scientists, business analysts, finance people, librarians (seriously!  I have a couple librarian-as-in-dead-trees friends who know SQL), scientists, etc.&lt;p&gt;In some ways this is too bad because SQL sucks as a language for many reasons (very clumsily compositional; verbose; duplicates math expressions &amp;amp; string manipulation of the host language, poorly; poor support for trees &amp;amp; graphs; easy to write insecure code; doesn&amp;#x27;t express the full relational algebra), but if it didn&amp;#x27;t suck in those ways it probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t have proven learnable by all those other professions that make it so popular.</text></comment>
<story><title>SQL: One of the most valuable skills</title><url>http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2019/02/12/sql-most-valuable-skill/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slap_shot</author><text>SQL is one the most amazing concepts I&amp;#x27;ve ever experienced. It&amp;#x27;s nearly 5 decades old and there is no sign of a replacement. We&amp;#x27;ve created countless other technologies to store and process data, and we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those technologies (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc).&lt;p&gt;I run a early stage company that builds analytics infrastructure for companies. We are betting very heavily on SQL, and Craigs post rings true now more than ever.&lt;p&gt;Increasingly, more SQL is written in companies by analysts and data scientists than typical software engineers.&lt;p&gt;The advent of the MMP data warehouse (redshift, bigquery, snowflake, etc) has given companies with even the most limited budget the ability to warehouse and query an enormous amount of data just using SQL. SQL is more powerful and valuable today than it ever has been.&lt;p&gt;When you look into a typical organization, most software engineers aren&amp;#x27;t very good at SQL. Why should they be? Most complex queries are analytics queries. ORMs can handle a majority of the basic functions application code needs to handle.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps going against Craig&amp;#x27;s point is the simple fact that we&amp;#x27;ve abstracted SQL away from a lot of engineers across the backend and certainly frontend and mobile. You can be a great developer and not know a lot about SQL.&lt;p&gt;On the other end of the spectrum are the influx of &amp;quot;data engineers&amp;quot; with basic to intermediate knowledge of HDFS, streaming data or various other NoSQL technologies. They often know less about raw SQL than even junior engineers because SQL is below their high-power big data tools.&lt;p&gt;But if you really understand SQL, and it seems few people truly today, you command an immense amount of power. Probably more than ever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rjbwork</author><text>(please excuse my typing. i have one hand to use ATM)
yup. we bet super hard on sql too. Its fantastic if you know what you&amp;#x27;re doing.  We ca import arbitrary data and expose it as normal tables to our customers for analysis&amp;#x2F;transform&amp;#x2F;export along with having a silod access controlled place for them to see just their data. sql is a great technology, and is extremely flexible.&lt;p&gt;I love it.  If you&amp;#x27;re looking to learn it and fundamentals, check out Jennifer Widom&amp;#x27;s course from Harvard.  I can safely credit her w&amp;#x2F; my career.</text></comment>