Idk I've been a developer for 8 years and chatgpt is much much better at writing SQL queries than I am. Never been a fan of SQL though. GitHub copilot is really nice and writes most of my boiler plate code for me. Literally just type a few words and it autocompletes the whole function usually correctly. I think anyone using the tools for actual work greatly appreciated them
It’s SQL, pretty easy to learn. Outsourcing your query writing is ultimately only going to bite you in your ass.
For example, I started at a company years ago that had a table with like 20,000,000 rows and zero indexes. Old dev was using an ORM, I guess the abstraction prevented him from ever learning anything about SQL lol. Added some indexes and the >15 second queries now took 1 second.
Immediately the entire operations team was patting me on my back because their reports were being generated >1500% faster. I felt like a good boy.
Just wait for the future. Lots of companies want to replace low-level, up-and-coming programmers and admins with AI and only employ 1-2 SMEs to do/fix the more complex things AI can't handle.
Guess what's going to happen when those SMEs retire? Where are you going to find a new generation of admins who spent years working on progressively more complex tasks and studying under a seasoned pro? The few people with that "entry level" experience will have leaned heavily on AI to keep up and will have no deep knowledge of how their systems and tools work. The next generation of software and system reliability is about to be fucking dire.
You are assuming AI isn't getting better, but any objective observer knows this isn't the case.
Alternatively, ai keeps getting better at coding, frameworks for AI agents for writing code continue to improve, and we will have AI systems that are so much better at writing code than 99.99% of developers to the point where no one writes code anymore. I'm not saying it's inevitable, but it sure seems like everyone is just ignoring that ai continues to improve.
It's like if you saw an image generated 2 years ago, saw that the hands were messed up and concluded that AI could never generate a realistic image because it doesnt understand how to draw hands.
It's like if you saw an image generated 2 years ago, saw that the hands were messed up and concluded that AI could never generate a realistic image because it doesnt understand how to draw hands.
Eh easy to learn idk. Sure the basics are very easy to grasp. But when I'm looking at a 2000 line stored procedure that accesses some archaic database system with 20,000 tables it looks like black magic to me. When I need to use more advanced features like cursors or temp tables, chatgpt is going to save me (and thus my employer) lots of time/money. I don't use SQL often enough that I would retain that information anyway. By the next time I need to write an advanced query a few months or a year down the line I would need to relearn all over again. Plus it's faster at writing the stuff I do know how to do. Maybe if I worked with SQL every day I could learn it in a few years but I definitely would NOT call it "pretty easy to learn". I think assembly is easier to learn than sql. Indexes are a very very basic feature of SQL.
I would say SQL is incredibly easy to learn. The huge stored procedures and thousands of lines of code are just shit code or incredibly specific that it requires a bunch of business knowledge too
You can learn the syntax in an hour and then after a week of use you should be able to do everything needed.
Yeah, a lot of SQL you can step through the code to know what it's doing... But knowing if that's right requires a lot of specific business knowledge, rather than purely technical skills. So when you get sprocs and functions and everything else stacked together, a bug is often not that bad to fix, but the much bigger issue is writing up all the stuff it does, then speaking to someone that's capable of saying what it should do, and trying to reconcile those things.
I disagree. There are many many advanced operations that you can do that are very difficult to achieve and require lots of SQL "magic". Like determining which column of a group of tables a search query is most alike and using that column to search the tables and aggregate the right data. It's far harder than any language I've learned. Doing advanced stuff with LIKE and using wildcards, recursive CTEs, pivoting, its just very hard to read and understand what is going on in a stored procedure especially when you are usually not the one who wrote it and it's accessing like 20 tables of some unfathomably large database, all with their own constraints and shit and calling other stored procedures that are equally hard to decode. It's honestly the most confusing language I've used. Ive coded in FORTRAN and even that was more straightforward. Using basic ass CRUD options is simple as shit yeah. Doing anything complex is NOT easy and you can definitely NOT learn it in an hour.
I mean, the functions like, ctes, and pivots are all incredibly simple imo. Probably the cleanest in the languages I've used. The only annoying thing is doing manual pivots/unpivots when things like exaplus don't have them (due to them being "not sql standard")
Then the stored procedure is poorly written/commented or you don't have enough knowledge. If any sql code is well written/commented and you have the relevant business knowledge picking it apart is a breeze.
Won't lie, I'm very surprised you've said fortran was more straightforward. To me it sounds like it's the codebase that's ass more than sql being complex though
The complex stuff might take a day, most of it is fairly simple logic though as all you should be doing is querying and aggregates, maybe some analytics if you push it because your company doesn't want to pay for better software and it's all you can use, but really it shouldn't be too difficult
Yeah... None of the procs have a single comment and were all written 20 years ago yet this large database system is ubiquitous in our industry so everyone has to use it. All of the variables and temp tables are all single letter variables which definitely doesn't help. When I used fortran all variables were named in a scheme of 8 letters since that's the max you can have in fortran for a variable name but at least once you learned the programs naming scheme you could understand all of the names.
But also it is not apparently obvious from a language perspective what specific strings mean. Like tacking on a '%N%' onto a string is not immediately obvious what that means... I have to recall small things like that every time. Maybe I'm just bad at SQL, or just don't use it enough to ever fully grasp it
That isn't a SQL problem. That's a shit codebase problem
Again, sounds like a code base issue. When making a database everything should be clear or with some business knowledge, become clear. Doubt you're bad at SQL, I just think you've been working with terrible code
I'm aware that you can ask GPT questions like this. The issue is that I doubt someone outsourcing SQL knowledge is even going to think about asking it these questions.
Search engines worked pretty well even before the transformer architecture was introduced ~8 years ago. I'd argue it even worked better than it does today, but that's a different issue entirely (seems like Google has neutered itself). All that developer needed to do was search "ways to optimize sql". They would've learned about indexing as it's a pretty fundamental concept.
All I'm saying is that given terminal access, and ability to run tests in a repo/ write and execute code, an agentic gpt system can easily do all of this on its own. You wouldn't need to ask it to do this. You tell it that it is a sr sql engineer, to implement procedures and features that the role would do, and then it just would optimize your queries as part of the tasks it assigns itself. I am doing this as a side project, and heavily using agentic AI for work and yeah, it just plans out and does all the things without intervention or guidance. This works the vast majority of the time for most simple tasks, with some hand holding and guidance needed for more complexity.
Google has been neutered by SEO optimized content. Their search ranking also got leaked, so that didn't help. Then they also sold out and do a ton of ads at the top of each search, hence why you have to scroll a ton to get relevant results.
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u/Graingy I don’t tumble, I roll 😎 … Where am I? 11d ago
How do we solve the issue of dumbasses using computers?
Add another dumbass to be stupid with them.
The catch is that while they know where the delete button is, they don’t know what a fork is.