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Discussion on: You Can Do it in SQL, Stop Writing Extra Code for it

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fjo_costa profile image
Fernando Costa

I'm trying hard, but I don't understand the concept of this post. From the purpose of databases to infrastructure management, I don't think I'd ever apply this method, even if it could cost me 10x in performance(in which case I would simply scale).

Use the superpowers of SQL to make your life easier as a software engineer.

Nope.

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geshan profile image
Geshan Manandhar

I can agree to disagree :)

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Hi @fjo_costa ,

it's the not the first time I hear this argument, and I'm not picking on you but I would honestly like to understand why you're against the idea of achieving 10x speed by using a well tested query or two.

I know it's harder to maintain if the specs change, but you can still swap the query for something else in the future, especially because ORMs tend to catch up to SQL features at some point.

Also, lots of languages have safe SQL generators, which mean you don't have to actually write the entire query, you can use tools like Arel.

I've built a query engine for composable conditions to select targets to send push notifications to once on it and I probably wrote two or three of pure SQL in total. I was still using the ORM, just augmented it through relational algebra, PostgreSQL json and basic geo support. It would have been immensely slower to do "in the app" (especially with hundres of thousands of devices). The engine was super fast and I had no caching.

I assure you I didn't anything special with tests, just tested that by selecting a condition, I had this or that device back, all inside the ORM.

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geshan profile image
Geshan Manandhar
  • its test what you write not the library you are using and SQL has been around longer than many languages I know. SQL is one of the most battle-tested things. Thanks for your views @rhymes !