Reply to post: What's really new?

A bad day for DBAs: MIT boffins are replacing you with a mere spreadsheet

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

What's really new?

I didn't read the papers yet, but what's really new against most "query generators"? The UI may be interesting, but how good is the query generator behind? Can it generate the most performing query for a given RDBMS?

One of the biggest issues of RDBMS and SQL is you can't think in a "procedural" oriented manner. RDBMS and SQL are set oriented. If you can select and manipulate the right sets in the right way, you achieve the best performance. Too many DB developers never learn this "art". Could a tool like this solve this issue?

Then there are the underlying DBMS "nuisances" - structuring (and maintaining) the database correctly for the data set while using the right database engine features require a deep knowledge of a given product. And a true DBA task is usually this one - fixing people queries is not the main one.

A few years ago a colleague of mine tried to order a huge machine (lots of GBs of RAM, many cores) because his "critical" queries on a dataset of his were running to slow. It turned out his database structure was dreadful (only varchar fields, missing indexes, lots of duplicated data, etc. etc.). Once properly fixed, everything run in a few tens of seconds on his laptop....

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