About

This is my personal blog. I use it to write down everything I learn and run into, at work and in my own side projects, so I don't have to learn it twice.

I've been building data-driven software for a long time now. Plenty of SQL on PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite, a lot of text and data wrangling, and more slow queries than I'd like to admit. Somewhere along the way I noticed that the notes I kept for myself were the most useful thing I owned, and that most of them would have saved me a weekend when I was starting out.

So here they are, cleaned up. Each post is something I actually did: a query that ate an afternoon, a pattern I keep coming back to, a thing the docs explain in one line that took me a week to really get. I run the SQL before I post it and I say which database and version I used, because nothing is more annoying than a query that worked once on somebody else's engine.

If you're new to SQL, welcome. You don't need to know the jargon yet, you just need someone to show you the path they took and where they tripped. If you've been around a while, I hope you still find a trick or two.

Some links might earn me a small commission. That never decides what I write about or recommend. If I wouldn't use it myself, it's not here.

Found something broken, or want me to write about something? Drop me a line. I read everything.