this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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SQL enjoyer?
Every time I use it I feels like I'm going back to the 90s. No variables, no functions; Oh but you can do a CTE or subquery.......๐
UNION ALL, UNION ALL, UNION ALL... "There's got to be a better way, surely..."
looks up better way
"Oh, what the fuck?!.... Nope, this will just be quicker..." UNION ALL, UNION ALL, UNION ALL...
Join in a table sharing column names... Everything breaks. You gotta put the new prefixes in front of all the headers you called in now. In every select, in every where, etc... Which is weird because that kinda works like a variable and it's fine...
"When you see this little piece of text, it means all this, got it?"
"Okay. Yep. Easy."
"So why can't you do that with expressions?"
SQL SCREAMS MANICALLY
"Okay, okay, okay!... Jesus..."
And then you try put a MAX in a where and it won't let you because you gotta pull all the maxes out in their own query, make a table, join them in, and use them like a filter...
I hate it. It has speed, when you can finally run the script, but everything up to that is so...ugh.
While I agree that "SQL Enjoyer" seems like a weird category, I personally love SQL. I've been using it professionally for over 20 years, and I've yet to encounter a more elegant, efficient, and practical language for handling data in a relational database. Every attempt I've seen to replace it with something simpler has fallen far short.
Which database systems were you dealing with, that didn't allow variables? My personal favorite is PostgreSQL, which does allow them on scripting languages, such as PLPGSQL.
See, I don't have to worry about such details. I work in corporate software dev, which means that everything is an MSSQL database where most of the tables contain only an ID of a table-specific format and a JSON blob. Why use an ORM when you can badly reimplement NoSQL in a relational database instead?
hey hey, there there. don't worry. most of the major NoSQL DBs implement just as horrible of travesties
Yep.
PostgreSQL is where its at, everybody else just hasn't figured that out yet.