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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of Ada
Date: 27 Oct 2024 18:40:43 GMT
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On Sun, 27 Oct 2024 09:46:15 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> I never bothered learning the more arcane side of SQL because if I ever
> managed to get the query right, it was always so abysmally slow that it
> was quicker to use a series of simple queries and join them together in
> application code rather than SQL

We had a support person who spent days if not months crafting a query 
using about every DB2 scalar function known to man. I forget the DB2 
versions but it started to fail on an older one that only allowed a 4k 
buffer but worked on the newer ones that handled 8k. Being a series of 
CONCATs if anything in the chain returned null the whole thing failed. 

It was a work of art that was copied from site to site unchanged because 
nobody, including myself, could figure it out. When we needed an 
equivalent for SQL Server which didn't have some of the matching scalars I 
took the programming approach. I use joins sparingly but there reaches a 
point where you're being too cute and it's unmaintainable.