this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Thanks, I will kot forget that the next time I have to do SQL!

Still wild there are no simpler language that have grown in popilarity for databases though.

[–] expr@programming.dev 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

To be honest, it's remarkably simple for what it's doing. There's a ton of details that are abstracted away. Databases are massively complex things, yet we can write simple queries to interact with them, with semantics that are well-understood and documented. I think, like anything else, it requires a bit of effort to learn (not a lot, though). Once you do, it's pretty easy to use. I've seen many non-technical people learn enough to write one-off queries for their own purposes, which I think is a testament to its simplicity.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Oneliners are simple I give that to you, but then you have those incomplete tables and whatnot. Like take all entries from A and join B on A.id and B.id, set the result to some default if B doesn't exist.

You are surely going to whip up a perfect string of SQL but I'd struggle.

[–] expr@programming.dev 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

Heh yeah that's pretty straightforward:

SELECT a.*, COALESCE(b.some_col, 'some_default_val') as b_result
FROM a LEFT JOIN b ON (a.id = b.id);

This will produce at least 1 row for every row in a, and if a.id doesn't match any b.id, the value of b_result will be 'some_default_val'.

Not sure if that's exactly what you were describing (since it was a little ambiguous), but that's how I interpreted it.

Ultimately it's just a matter of investing a little time to learn it. It's not fundamentally difficult or complex, even though you certainly can write very complex queries.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

You make me think of that xkcd with two mineral experts, wildly overestimate what ordinary people know about their speciality 😅

I have to do something like that sql like once every 2 years, so I tend to not invest enough, and then forget how it works. Give it some iterations and maybe I'll be OK one day!

Thanks for the solution!

Edit only found the meme template:

So you have to insert yourself: SQL, database specialist, SELECT, JOINS, COALESCE

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