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0 pointstreis4y ago0 comments

I think there's some low hanging fruit out there. Simple improvements to make queries easier to write and maintain.

As an example, ActiveRecord allows you to define scopes. If you have an account things like:

platinum: -> value >100000

churn_risk: -> churn>.95

You can then chain these together i.e Account.platinum.churn_risk to get all the platinum accounts at risk of churn.

Afaik there's nothing similar in SQL. If your definition of a platinum customer changes you have to change a bunch of different queries instead of one definition.

0 comments

no-s4y ago

While I agree it’s a PITA, most SQL-interfaced RDBMS support views, which is a way to abstract the Platinum customer issue you pose into something composable, albeit in SQL terms, not in the dotted property chaining style you propose. In the past I’ve created view generators to automatically populate a sweet syntactic palette for application semantics. Modern query planners are hardly bothered by the implied excess of joins any more, and will often use the embedded literals to optimize the query plan before execution…

I’ve plucked that low hanging fruit before, and it can taste great even in SQL sauce.

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