SQL, a Good Old Friend?

More complex concepts like nested queries, aggregating, stored procedures and views, though, are not so pervasive in the industry as one might want to think. There are many casual application developers out there (me included), especially those doing web applications in VB or PHP. And for those, nested SQL queries, cursors and views and even transactions are unfamiliar ground, because they simply do not need them.

SQL is also not so standard as one might want. While simple SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT statements are quite similar in their effects (small subtle differences remain), the portability fun begins when things get a bit more serious (anyone here who ported a MySQL application to Oracle recently?).

But my critique of the approach goes much deeper.