On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Dave Smith wrote:
To answer the question about the state of BYU's CS 452 class:
My experience with BYU's CS 452 was a bit different than some of the other
posters. We did focus heavily on theory, all the way up to 5th Normal
Form, Prolog, and other "deep theory" stuff. However, our lab assignments
consisted of some serious Oracle SQL. We were given English statements
like "Find all the flights that do such and such after leaving through two
consecutive airports in New York with a crew of less than 7." They were
non-trivial. During the course of the semester, we had to craft about 60
hairy Oracle SQL statements (mostly SELECTs), including recursive SQL.
Can you confirm or deny this idea (that I heard many times):
most [if not all] of the "hairy SQL statements" in the assignments were
hairy only because of arbitrary constraints (e.g. not being allowed to use
"GROUP BY" or various other things that you'd use in "the real world" when
trying to find the same data).
That's useful for theory, but I think it gives you entirely the wrong
sense of what's important in the real world. Did you see this sort of
thing at all? Or did most of the "hairy SQL statements" end up being
exactly how you would implement the same thing in "the real world"?
~ Ross
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