For me, it’s CTE’s. I find it amazing to complete a calculation with clear intermediate steps, and goes a long way towards convincing people to use SQL rather than Excel to perform calculations on large tables of data.

What construct do you like using on a daily basis?

  • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Only thing cooler than CTEs are Recursive CTEs, but I struggle to find use cases where I can sneak one in.

    • luciole (he/him)@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I believe recursive CTEs are pretty cool for tree traversal. Anytime you’ve got a table with a foreign key on its own primary key they might come in handy.

  • szeis4cookie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I was skeptical of CTEs for a long time. I just used subqueries when I could in T SQL, and then I got a new job and my new company used Postgres. In the adaptation process I took a new look at CTEs and became a convert - it’s just nicer and easier to read the intermediate step than as a subquery

  • ddh@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    CTEs are so helpful for me. They make complex queries much easier to construct and lets me ‘unit test’ the parts I’m working on.

    • megaman1970@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      Those work, but require a lot of careful structuring to get right, and can be a pain to debug. With a CTE, you can just call on the intermediate steps to trace down problems.

  • itty53@vlemmy.net
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    1 year ago

    You can create a functional enum view by just assigning enums as the column names and storing a single row of the int (or whatever enum) representation.

    Then use that view in a cross join. You can (almost) eliminate magic numbers entirely and makes the code much more human legible.

  • DarkAngelofMusic@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    CTEs can be useful, particularly in PostgreSQL, where there are writable CTEs, but a lot of the time, I prefer using temp tables over CTEs, as they often perform better for larger datasets. I think one of my favorite constructs is window functions. I’ve found many uses for them, over the years.

  • Leo Uino@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Yes, CTEs are awesome. Especially when you don’t force materialization and the optimizer can work its magic.

    I’ve had a lot of fun with window functions as well.