Life Musings

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This article is for anybody that is interested in knowing more about SQL especially the JJCs (newbies) like me and people who are yet to decide on which programming language to learn. I am here to convince you and not to confuse you (secondary school debate closing theme😂) that SQL is the way💃🏾. Lately, I have been doing some self-training and MOOC courses. It has been so hard for me to complete any MOOC in the past btw (thanks to the village people, lol😂). However I finally completed one recently and I was so proud of myself #FlipsHair. It was an "Intro to SQL" and I had so much fun doing the course that I finished it in few hours. 

I am doing another SQL course for data scientist presently. I just hope I complete that one too  (if the village people permits, lol🙈). In this article I will be listing my top 5 reasons why I love SQL.

1) My number 1 reason for falling in love with SQL is the simplicity of the language. I didn't even believe it could be categorized as a programming language because it felt more like interpreting English to me on a higher level. The first few lessons was like a walk over for me. Of course, I am still learning and I know I will still get to those crazy stages but talk about first impression...SQL got me👍

2) Another reason why I love SQL is that it doesn't discriminate😆. You know in the past when you see all those programmers, people tend to assume that these set of people either studied computer science, software engineering or any IT related course. These days I have seen a lot of peeps learn SQL...I mean from Economists to Business Administrators to even Health workers. It cuts across every career and anyone can just pick it up and learn fast. Note: I am not saying other programming languages cannot be picked up by anybody. In my opinion, I feel SQL is the easiest😉.

3)The commands are easy to remember and very relatable...As an example if you want to select data from a database, the command line to use is: SELECT * FROM table; You can also explicitly state that SELECT age, name  FROM people; Looking at what I just wrote, anybody can already pick 1 or 2 things from what I am trying to do with this statement without any fore knowledge about the language. There is more to what I just wrote so don't assume it is this simple but I just taught you a single line of code anywayz (you should be proud of yourself, hahaha😂)

4) It is a popular language. According to Sqlizer, it is the second most popular programming language and it has been around for a while (over 40 years). Do you know what means? It means that solving a problem won't be so difficult because you can get A LOT of resources online and it also means that talent is readily available, which in turn fuels knowledge creation and community growth (Adapted from Sqlizer).

5) And finally, learning SQL has made me feel like one bad ass developer (just kidding. I cannot even code to save my life). But seriously, after learning the language to an extent, there is this confidence that I have now built around my skill set that makes me feel like I can at least say that I am a developer or let's just say an upcoming developer🤔. Also according to Brent Ozar, learning SQL will teach you to think in sets rather than iteratively. In the long term, this will change the way you think about working with data and lead to improvements in your database code.

Of course SQL is not perfect. I have read a lot of articles about why people won't choose SQL and some of its disadvantages. However, today I am only focusing on it strengths and waving off its many weaknesses simply because I love it😍. I hope this article is an interesting read for you as much as i loved writing it. Until next time...💋

Not SQL related...Just me being me😜