Re: Thoughts on "Love Your Database"

On May 4, 2016, at 11:59 , Paul Jungwirth <pj@illuminatedcomputing.com> wrote:
> 
> I think teaching this is a different thing than just teaching SQL syntax. I haven't seen it written about a lot. It must be somewhere, but any book encouraging "outsiders" to use more SQL could benefit from giving them direction like that.

I've never seen relational databases explained properly for beginners.

I did a pretty successful boot camp two-week database course where it was heavily built around set operations. I started with a simple query on a table, then we went into all the cool things you could do to combine queries using UNION, INTERSECT and EXCEPT. To this day, I hardly ever see set operations used in SQL, and oftentimes when you have a hard query to write, set operations are the natural expression. Anyhow.