Visual Structured Query Language (SQL)

I’ve been wanting to blog about learning Structured Query Language (SQL) since November 2013. My reasons are to document my own learning and provide a different mode for other students to learn. Why a different mode of learning (you might ask), when we already have SQL blogs galore, YouTube tutorials out the wazoo, Microsoft Virtual Academy, Codecademy (ok, so they don’t have SQL at the time of this writing, but just you wait!), and many leather-bound books on SQL? Because as you might have guessed from the preceding rhetorical question, the SQL market is more like a bazaar, and for a neophyte like myself, I found the sheer quantity of resources overwhelming; not to mention the various frameworks, platforms, vendors, and please—don’t even get me started on the acronyms!

But perhaps the most pressing reason for providing a different mode of learning is that the vast majority of resources and tutorials do not incorporate any visual representation of the SQL statements we write. Assuming you don’t get an error after executing your code, you’ll either see a table (e.g. SELECT) or a message notifying you of what just happened (e.g. UPDATE). For the message, it can be unsettling not to see exactly what just happened. For the table, while you can see the rows and columns returned, there is no visual assurance that your results are valid. Of course it’s great to walk out your front door on your birthday to find a new car in the driveway with your name on it (maybe we should write SURPRISE instead of SELECT), but you’ll develop a better appreciation of that car if you can watch it (or better yet, assemble it yourself) while it makes its way down the assembly line.

Watching your car being made is impractical in real life, as is viewing your SQL code being executed inside the computer. One reason for the obfuscation is performance. You can’t perform well in school if you take several months off to watch your car being made. Likewise, your computer wouldn’t perform well if it showed you every detail of what’s happening on the inside. So what compromise can be reached?

Instead of studying the finished car in the minutest detail, let’s look at a model. Instead of sacrificing performance so we can reap the satisfaction of knowing how our SQL works, let’s take a sample or set of data for instructional purposes.

Visually learning SQL is just one component of the new learning mode. The other part is storytelling, or simulation in technical speak. More on that as the process evolves.