This post builds upon the previous post. If you haven’t checked it out already, please do so here In my opinion, SQL is easy to get working initially, but optimizing SQL is a whole different beast. Thankfully, I recently had the chance to optimize a whole bunch of SQL for one of our critical platforms resulting in an over 300% reduction in execution time. While I can’t promise the same result for anyone following this article, I do outline some of my learnings on optimizing for queries on text columns below using the most recent Raleigh Crime dataset. Read more

Background I’ve had the pleasure of working on a lot of different projects and while the language may have ranged from Java to Golang, most have communicated with a database using SQL. In the beginning of my career, I viewed SQL as a unfortunate neccessity, Professor Imilienski at Rutgers changed my opinion. His project and lectures showed us how to view the and analyze datasets in a relational database, and how SQL can be used to gather some pretty powerful insights. Read more