RE: SQL Syntax

["M. Lazarus" <mlazarus@xxxxxxxx>]

Joe,

At 10/29/02 03:24 PM, you wrote:
> I just wondered if people were as worried about the black box aspect of
> SQL, and
> the answer is "some are, some aren't".  That pretty much jives with
> programmer attitudes throughout the ages, even way back in the late 18th
> century when I started programming <grin>.
 I've been following this exchange w/ interest, to see if there was
something I was missing.  I recently worked w/ a non-AS/400 guy that knew
Oracle and SQL Server.  His pride and joy was the creation of mammoth SQL
statements that were impossible to debug w/o ripping apart the entire
statement into tiny sections and running each part independently.  (As an
aside, he created one so complex, that he got the SQL processor to fail!  A
PTF was issued.)

 This seems to be the standard way of debugging SQL.  Only in rarest of
cases would you have to do that w/ an RPG program.  Also, w/ a  half
decently written HLL program you can usually see the program flow w/ a
cursory look.  W/ anything more than a trivial SQL statement you have to
study it well.

 As SQL capabilities expand, it seems to me that the syntax is getting
more and more cryptic.

 I do think that SQL is GREAT for ad hoc queries and a few things that are
more difficult to do in RPG (such as soft coding the ORDER BY clause or
attaching to other databases on the fly), but for most heavy duty
processing I find it clumsy.

 -mark