I love SQL

I used to dislike SQL. I learned to deal with databases using ORMs and when I needed to open psql to understand what was going on I felt like I was losing my time dealing with SQL. Why would someone want to deal with SQL when having a simple API in the language you are working with?

After some time I moved to the database infra space (as CTO of a company dealing with hundreds of postgres databases) and I started to work with SQL every day. It was not that bad and I learned to appreciate it little by little. And I finally loved it, I have done all sorts of crazy stuff with it, like rendering my company logo, recreating a game of life simulation and starting a company (that raised +50M) where the only interface is SQL.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think ORMs are useless, quite the opposite, I think they are good and developers should use them (they help you to avoid making mistakes) but that shouldn’t stop someone from learning SQL. You are going to find it somewhere in your professional career, there are many systems that only talk SQL (actually all the database systems end up talking SQL, hello MongoDB). And being honest, any developer can learn the basics of SQL in a few hours. That plus a few LLM prompts and you are good to go for 90% of the use cases. Learning a little bit of database internals is also good, that’ll put you in the top 1% of developers worldwide.

But there is one thing about SQL that amazes me: the runtime. It’s so simple, a simple text language, you send it over the wire and boom, you have results. No npm install, just a simple language, focused on a simple (but powerful) task, that lived many iterations of databases and systems over 50 years (!!!). That’s hard to beat, I don’t know so many designs that survived that long.

You have local runtimes (sqlite, duckdb), you can install postgres, mysql… you can go to neon and get a postgres database in a few milliseconds. You don’t even need data locally, you can query data in S3 and other places, you can even query data coming from other processes, it’s just amazing how simple it is. There is no other programming language with this simplicity.

I know SQL is not perfect when you need to work with complex logic. You can always twist it but you end up with crazy 2000 line SQL queries. In 20 years working with it I only found a few cases where it gets actually unmanageable to run data operations but many times it’s easy to use any other procedural language. You need to like functional programming as well, but you get used to thinking in that way after a while.

I’ll probably end my career writing SQL or talking to an LLM that writes SQL :)