can someone be a SQL "developer" or "programmer" without CS background?

[ultimate99]

I had a conversation with my colleague at work the other day about healthcare and IT and how programming can be self-taught and I wanted to get your opinions as well:

 

1. What makes someone a SQL developer or programmer? 

2. What about someone in the healthcare field and wants to focus on SQL rather than straight up programming (java, C, C++, javascript, etc.), is that possible?

3. As my workflow develops, I'm moving away from MS and limiting to just using a Mac, would that affect learning/using SQL in anyway (especially that hospital systems tend to depend on Windows heavily) other than https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/?

[adrynalyne]

  On 05/01/2017 at 12:06, ultimate99 said:

I had a conversation with my colleague at work the other day about healthcare and IT and how programming can be self-taught and I wanted to get your opinions as well:

 

1. What makes someone a SQL developer or programmer? 

2. What about someone in the healthcare field and wants to focus on SQL rather than straight up programming (java, C, C++, javascript, etc.), is that possible?

3. As my workflow develops, I'm moving away from MS and limiting to just using a Mac, would that affect learning/using SQL in anyway (especially that hospital systems tend to depend on Windows heavily) other than https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/?

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1. The ability to do it. I imagine it would include designing and deploying databases with proper normalization and best practices, knowing how to write stored procedures, triggers, views, functions etc. 

2. Yes but it limits you. I do both where I work. 

3. Not really, you could always spin up a VM for sql server either locally or in azure. Programs like datagrip can work with t-sql fine. 

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

I have a friend who works as a SQL developer at an healthcare company.  His degree is in business, and he got started coding with HTML and ColdFusion in the 1990s.  In response to your questions:

 

1. What makes him a SQL developer is the HR department, because they are the ones who set job titles at his place of employment.
2. It's a good idea to be comfortable in 2-3 languages, and have passing familiarity with a few more.  This allows you to help troubleshoot and fix things which use your database.  You don't have to be an expert, but you should have some level of fluency.  This will also help your career/paycheck as you move forward and take on new roles and responsibilities.
3. You can always run Windows in a Boot Camp partition or via Parallels.  It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to familiarize yourself with using Linux and Microsoft SQL for Linux as well.

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

[sao123]

1)in order to be a SQL developer, one must have a good understanding of relational databases, data types and sizes, data formats.  Tables, Views, Queries, etc.

2)In most cases the concept of a pure SQL developer is rare, generally multi-discipline developers are the ones chosen for positions.  One might be a SQL developer as part of a back end or full stack web developer.  one might be a SQL developer as part of being a DBA.

3)Since there are many versions of SQL (MySQL, SQL server, Oracle, etc) each with their own quirks and differences, one must understand the targeted platform in order to make full use of its capabilities.

 

Having been a full stack developer for only 3 years has shown me that SQL is one of the most hardest parts of any project.  Rarely are simple join queries enough for business.  I have had to pass in entire tables as parameters to stored procedures and then process those records in 3 different ways in the same procedure (add/remove/update).

Many times when trying to mate summary data with detailed data, then trying to only see the most recent 3 records, requires a lot of nesting queries, CTE's, and lots of other heavy work.

Then you can get into other databases which are not relational and are instead Key-Value databases which might store entire other databases inside a record as an XML or JSON string.

 

SQL work so far is proving to be far more work than I was ever prepared for.

[Seahorsepip Veteran]

SQL developers aren't that rare, big organisation databases are managed by people who are solely working with sql so why would they need to know programming?

 

Also do you mean C# with CS? Since SQL can be accessed by a multitude of programming languages, not just C#.

Also there are multiple SQL standards, e.g. SQL Server(also known as MSSQL or TSQL), MySQL, Oracle etc.