My first dev job about 15 years ago I took over this in-house developed intranet. Some queries took quite long (30 to 60 seconds), and according to "the last guy" there wasn't any way to speed it up. At the time I didn't know anything about SQL (literally never used it before), but I figured there really had to be some way to do this faster. I just read some basic documentation, rewrote a few queries, and now I got the exact same results in 1 to 2 seconds. A few months later after I learned a bit more about SQL and optimized it further (just by adding an index IIRC) and now it was fast enough to appear instantaneous.
I'm still far from an SQL expert, and certainly wasn't 15 years ago, but you can get a lot of win by just spending as little as one or two days learning about SQL. It really surprises me how some people don't.
Then again, for a very long time I thought awk was basically useless to learn, until I did last year after which I kicked myself for not learning it sooner as I had spent a ridiculous amount of time cooking up inferior solutions for ~20 years, and spending just an hour or two learning awk would have been a great ROI *shrug*.
I guess the moral of the story is that you can never be quite sure if something is useful or useless until you actually learn it.
I'm still far from an SQL expert, and certainly wasn't 15 years ago, but you can get a lot of win by just spending as little as one or two days learning about SQL. It really surprises me how some people don't.
Then again, for a very long time I thought awk was basically useless to learn, until I did last year after which I kicked myself for not learning it sooner as I had spent a ridiculous amount of time cooking up inferior solutions for ~20 years, and spending just an hour or two learning awk would have been a great ROI *shrug*.
I guess the moral of the story is that you can never be quite sure if something is useful or useless until you actually learn it.