/SQL

5 Best SQL Games To Master Database Skills In 2025

- Hristo Bogoev tl;dr: “Instead of grinding through another dry tutorial, you can learn SQL by solving crimes, escaping islands, or competing with other programmers. These 5 SQL games actually make database learning fun - and they work better than traditional methods.”

featured in #624

The Art Of SQL Query Optimization

- Jan Nidzwetzki tl;dr: “In a few evenings of vibe coding, I implemented the plan explorer for PostgreSQL. It iterates over a search space and generates visualizations that show when the plan changes and how many tuples are expected versus the actual number returned. This blog post examines the “art” of query optimization. It discusses the plan explorer tool, the images the tool generates, and the insights the tool provides into the decisions made by the PostgreSQL query optimizer.”

featured in #622

Getting AI To Write Good SQL

- Per Jacobsson tl;dr: “We will cover state-of-the-art approaches to context building and table retrieval, how to do effective evaluation of text-to-SQL quality with LLM-as-a-judge techniques, the best approaches to LLM prompting and post-processing, and how we approach techniques that allows the system to offer virtually certified correct answers.”

featured in #620

Leadership Power Tools: SQL And Statistics

- Matt Blewitt tl;dr: “A common pattern I’ve seen over the years have been folks in engineering leadership positions that are not super comfortable with extracting and interpreting data from stores, be it databases, CSV files in an object store, or even just a spreadsheet. We’re going to cover SQL & DuckDB, then some useful statistical tools: summary stats, distributions, confidence intervals and Bayesian reasoning.”

featured in #578

SQL Tips And Tricks

- Ben Nour tl;dr: “A somewhat opinionated list of SQL tips and tricks that I've picked up over the years in my job as a data analyst. Please note that some of these tips might not be relevant for all RDBMs.”

featured in #568

SQL Tips And Tricks

- Ben Nour tl;dr: “A somewhat opinionated list of SQL tips and tricks that I've picked up over the years in my job as a data analyst. Please note that some of these tips might not be relevant for all RDBMs.”

featured in #554

SQL Tips And Tricks

- Ben Nour tl;dr: “A somewhat opinionated list of SQL tips and tricks that I've picked up over the years in my job as a data analyst. Please note that some of these tips might not be relevant for all RDBMs.”

featured in #553

Sampling With SQL

- Tom Moertel tl;dr: “In this post, we’ll look at some clever algorithms for taking samples. These algorithms are fast and easily translated into SQL.”

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How SQL Query Works? SQL Query Execution Order For Tech Interview

tl;dr: “While SQL queries are written in a declarative, human-readable format, there is a complex process that occurs behind the scenes to execute these queries and retrieve the desired results. In this article, we'll delve into the inner workings of SQL queries, breaking down the process step by step.”

featured in #529

How We Built Text-to-SQL At Pinterest

tl;dr: “We took the rise in availability of LLMs as an opportunity to explore whether we could assist our data users with this task by developing a Text-to-SQL feature which transforms these analytical questions directly into code.” The authors describe the tools evolution and implementation. 

featured in #507