47 engineers on Hacker News describe using SQL first-hand: 12 endorse it, 3 regret it, 2 are mixed.
“I actually quite like SQL and enjoy programming in it”
endorse · personal · somat · 2025-11-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated into SQL... I've seen the difference he's made with his expertise.”
endorse · production · mkmccjr · 2025-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“absolutely, I've been using it for that at lot as well and it's remarkably well suited for it. there's really no better tool for the job.”
endorse · personal · airstrike · 2024-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been writing very thin CRUD db-access modules that use SQL and I run every request in a single transaction”
endorse · production · mattbillenstein · 2023-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“SQL is uniquely terrible -- and I say this as someone with a career spanning from Win32 C++ to every major web technology.”
regret · production · crazygringo · 2023-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Let me tell you, tracking how data moves from one stage to the next in that "ETL pipeline" is an absolute nightmare. Never again.”
regret · production · jredwards · 2023-08-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“CTEs are the best way to do this but get clunky and repetitive as you have to give each one a name.”
mixed · production · orthoxerox · 2023-04-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I still prefer writing plain SQL to using ORMs and their nifty tricks.”
endorse · production · noduerme · 2022-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use SQL container and find it to be no problem in practice to write integration tests for our pieces of Go code”
endorse · production · dagss · 2022-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In our team we use SQL quite heavily: Process millions of input events, sum them together, produce some output events”
endorse · production · dagss · 2022-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Decent grasp of SQL and a bit of handwavy knowledge about stats comes in handier than expected.”
endorse · production · 3 yr · oerpli · 2022-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So in new code we now use raw SQL and we don't find it all that hard - it's easy to maintain and doesn't take a lot of time.”
endorse · production · kgeist · 2021-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“SQL is very well-established, but it's also old, and it shows its age.”
regret · production · mcv · 2021-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“for us it's obviously easier to write SQL.”
endorse · production · nikita2206 · 2020-04-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm reasonable at SQL. I've been using it casually for 10 years.”
endorse · personal · 10 yr · nwallin · 2019-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We replaced our entire overnight testing and on-call operations department with SSD and a little bit of SQL optimization.”
endorse · production · hadlock · 2019-01-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I 'think SQL' all day, or at least a simple subset of it... SQL is freaking complicated once you get to the parts that make it so powerful.”
mixed · production · uptownJimmy · 2014-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Since you asked about challenges in prod: if you are not careful, the LLM can write wildly inefficient queries.”
neutral · production · mrothroc · 2026-07-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My comments are more in the context of OLAP queries and other non-normalised data often queried via SQL.”
neutral · production · djhn · 2026-05-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“A lot of SQL as well, we use DB2 as our main database.”
neutral · production · hnurl · 2025-07-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“about 20 years ago my bread and butter was SQL and I was writing stored procedures every single working day”
neutral · production · tharkun__ · 2024-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run as many methods as practical in parallel (sql, vector, full text, other methods, etc.) and return the first one that meets our threshold.”
neutral · production · 7thpower · 2024-05-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“generating historizing SQL queries ourselves”
neutral · production · ancieque · 2024-02-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I need to optimise some SQL query moving several sub queries that makes the execution plan costly”
neutral · production · braza · 2023-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've made this mistake before in prod, and without some janky lookup table of every date in existence... you need more code”
neutral · production · posting_mess · 2023-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“20 years of muscle memory writing bash / python / perl / awk / sql / ruby / JS / CSS selectors”
neutral · production · 20 yr · seanp2k2 · 2023-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The SQL queries fell apart in production because the front-end developer didn't know how indexes worked at all”
neutral · production · crazygringo · 2022-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This is why we don't use `*` in production SQL.”
neutral · production · cryptonector · 2021-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I recently removed all of my SQL-in-programming-language code (orm, strings of SQL) etc, and just wrote actual SQL in files”
neutral · personal · stopcraeting · 2021-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“first I write a select to grab all of the data I wish to modify, confirm that is correct, then add the set portion”
neutral · production · willcipriano · 2021-10-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“when you write SQL queries for a project, you typically do it once, and basically never again”
neutral · production · andrewmcwatters · 2021-05-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I lose 10-15% of my time chasing misplaced SQL scripts or SQL scripts with improper tweaks.”
neutral · production · MattGaiser · 2020-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“stuff that scales vertically (SQL) and some file share issues”
neutral · production · jve · 2020-05-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using it extensively for a ton of data tasks, even teaching SQL basics.”
neutral · personal · nathancahill · 2019-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“SQL: I mean, technically I've been using it for 10 years, but took the time to actually expand my knowledge”
neutral · production · 10 yr · Macha · 2018-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“And yet other application written with lots of SQL.”
neutral · production · Demiurge · 2017-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I just did some basic SQL queries on the dataset (min, max, average)”
neutral · personal · 3princip · 2017-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“There's some aggregations where we use SQL to do some basic stats”
neutral · production · keithnz · 2017-11-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“when we must really be flexible we write queries in SQL and manually unmarshal resultsets”
neutral · production · pmontra · 2017-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the dba did exactly what happened at gitlab but in sql”
neutral · production · chadcmulligan · 2017-02-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using SQL over 20 years in Oracle/Informix/Sybase/IBMDB2/MSSQL”
neutral · production · 20 yr · jasode · 2016-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's a big change from writing sql for over 10 years, but the pros far out weigh the cons.”
neutral · production · 10 yr · nogbit · 2013-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run web services and the like all in combinations of C, RPG, JAVA, embedded SQL, and such.”
neutral · production · Shivetya · 2013-01-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For the situations where it doesn't fit Django allows me to drop down to raw SQL for a solution.”
neutral · production · mburst · 2012-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had been using SQL quite a bit before, but I had never taken a database course at university.”
neutral · production · henrik_w · 2012-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“SQL, Word & Excel became my only daily companions.”
neutral · production · fbnt · 2011-06-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Having learned C, Java, SQL, Common Lisp, and Scheme on my own”
neutral · personal · masterponomo · 2010-08-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?