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SQL Design Patterns (2010)

(vadimtropashko.wordpress.com)
149 points mci | 1 comments | 27 Aug 25 04:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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alphazard ◴[30 Aug 25 20:17 UTC] No.45077668[source]▶
I always tell people to worry about the data structures that you want the database to maintain for you, and not worry about the SQL. You can always use Google to look up the SQL, or now ChatGPT to generate it for you. SQL is a not-that-great language and it intentionally hides what's going on. It is also different enough between databases that you need to pay attention. So learning to design/think in terms of SQL is probably not worth doing.

The set of data structures that you use to model and index a dataset is worth understanding, and designing in that space is a skill worth learning.

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1. awesome_dude ◴[30 Aug 25 22:55 UTC] No.45078711[source]▶
I don't get this - my database is going to be normalised to whatever is optimal (3rd normal form generally, denormalised for higher load/sharded/caching)

The indexing is where the main optimisations take place - hashmap indexes, or clustering indexes for priority queues.

What am I missing?