Too Long; Didn't Read
This <a href="https://m.signalvnoise.com/conceptual-compression-means-beginners-dont-need-to-know-sql-hallelujah-661c1eaed983" target="_blank">post</a> by <a href="https://m.signalvnoise.com/@dhh" target="_blank">@DHH</a> of Basecamp and Ruby-on-Rails fame sparked a bunch of discussion on the web and some thinking on my part. The author argues that various storage abstractions are now powerful enough that many developers of database-backed applications can be successful and effective without understanding the details of SQL syntax or precisely how the storage system works. He gives as a concrete example Basecamp 3 which serves millions of people and yet has no fully formed SQL statement in its entire code base and instead leans on the “Active Record” abstraction exposed by Rails. Active Record is an example of an object-relational mapper that allows a programmer to deal with objects in their native programming language that are then persisted (relatively) transparently to the underlying storage system.