Things I wished more developers knew about databases
I never realized this before but many excellent developers struggle with SQL beyond simple SELECT statements. I have a colleague who is by all accounts a deeply technical person but one day he confessed to me that he didn&#x27;t really grok SQL and that he&#x27;d rather work with a &quot;real&quot; procedural programming language to just store and retrieve data.<p>Part of it may be due to the fact SQL isn&#x27;t really a programming language but a declarative DSL for manipulating sets and tables. Things like GROUP BYs and PARTITION BYs (window functions) that come naturally to mathematical types&#x2F;functional programmers are less intuitive to procedural programmers.<p>I suspect this was what attracted developers to noSQL databases like Mongo in the first place -- it&#x27;s more attuned to a programmatic mindset.<p>(this is not universally true of course -- many programmers have no issues with SQL at all.)