Re: The Practical Benefits of the Relational Model

>
> I grant that point. But I make most of money by teaching SQL to
> programmers. I'm a multiple college degreed, Mensa member with a
> zillion years experience in what I am teaching. I'd be surprised and
> delighted if I found a newbie who got it all down in a week long
> class.
>

A few years back, I was making most of my money teaching database design and programming to seasoned professionals who had never been exposed to databases. Most of the classes lasted one week. Most of the people who "got it all down" got a chance to use SQL and a DBMS in the weeks following the course. So its hard to separate out what they learned from me, what they learned on the job, and what the interaction between those two learning modes was.

The hard part was not teaching them how databases work. The hard part was teaching them what databases are for. If they never got that, then they tended to conclude that programming against databases was like programming against files, only slower and less efficient.

Part of my material involved teaching SQL. Some of the same comments apply.

So, maybe you could give a short commentary on "what is SQL for?" Received on Mon Sep 16 2002 - 17:10:37 CEST