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0 pointschrsig2y ago0 comments

The types of issues you're enumerating are really part of a learning curve that every language and environment will have.

> not having basic functions for calculating percentiles or even a basic median

I don't think this is really true anymore; windowing functions are pretty prolific, and I think every major database will have some percentile functions

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crazygringo2y ago· 4 in thread

> The types of issues you're enumerating are really part of a learning curve that every language and environment will have.

They're not though. That's why excellent coders often despise having to learn and use SQL, and basically just refuse to. SQL is uniquely terrible -- and I say this as someone with a career spanning from Win32 C++ to every major web technology.

> every major database will have some percentile functions

MySQL still doesn't. MariaDB only added it in 2018, and I've been writing queries for a lot longer than that. (And MySQL only added window functions in 2018 as well.)

And remember that, for various reasons, you're often (usually?) stuck using a database engine in production that's several years old, since upgrading a database engine is not something to be taken lightly.

paulddraper2y ago

How many application languages have percentile functions?

setr2y ago

Nearly all of them, because any language designed in the last 30 years permits user defined libraries in trivial fashion, even amazingly letting you write those libraries in the same language you’ll use it. And even more incredibly, the libraries themselves can build on other libraries! (There’s even often a standard allowing libraries to be shared by different implementations … or rather, a standard that actually standardizes things beyond the language aesthetic)

Databases follow the COBOL model of extensibility — tis for me and not for thee. It is only to be done by the vendor, and maybe some third party specialists

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chrsigOP2y ago

> They're not though. That's why excellent coders often despise having to learn and use SQL, and basically just refuse to. SQL is uniquely terrible -- and I say this as someone with a career spanning from Win32 C++ to every major web technology.

This is basically a strawman + appeal to authority argument. I've no desire to bicker. "Uniquely terrible" is quite subjective, we'll have to agree to disagree on if it applies to sql.

crazygringo2y ago

Excuse me, but I'm certainly not "bickering" and I resent the insinuation. And you don't seem to understand what a strawman argument is.

I'm not going to write an article on this for you, but you can certainly see the sentiment frequently expressed on HN that the rise of NoSQL and of ORM's is a direct result of otherwise capable programmers not wanting to deal with SQL and its conceptual building blocks such as joins. Take that for what you will, but you might suspect there's a reason for it, and that it's not merely the learning curve for "every language".

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