Introduction to SQL
Learn about SQL and how better utilization helps us optimize our code and application.
We'll cover the following
Declarative programming language
SQL is a declarative programming language. As a user, we declare the result we want to obtain in a data processing pipeline executed against a known database model and a dataset.
The database model has to be statically declared so we know the type of every bit of data involved at the time the query is being carried out. A query result set defines a relation of a type determined or inferred when parsing the query.
SQL developers
As a developer, when working with SQL we work with a type system and something similar to relational algebra. We write code to retrieve and process the data we’re interested in, in the specific way we need.
RDBMS and SQL enable developers to think in terms of data structures and how to declare both the data structure and the dataset we want to obtain via our queries.
Some might then say that SQL forces us to be good developers because good programming involves good code and good data structures.