Say no to Venn diagrams when explaining SQL joins (2016)
><i>Honestly, if it were not for Venn diagrams, I may have never learned how SQL joins work. It might not be perfect, but if you'd tried to make 16-year-old me understand relational algebra in order to grok how the joins in his Django site were working, he'd have given up before he began.</i><p>The whole point of the article is that there are different visualizations that are much better than Venn diagrams (in fact Venn diagrams are totally misleading), and they don't require any relational algebra.<p>That said, if someone doesn't know what a cartesian product is (high school level math), perhaps they shouldn't be allowed near a database...