I'm not sure if my experience is typical, but every DBA I've known has been asked by management to "teach the basics of SQL to the team". And they all had their own stack of PowerPoint slides to teach people how to join tables and use GROUP BY
. It's far from a good use of their time (why not bring in a local community college teacher instead?) but it seems to be part of the job.
The one benefit I saw to having our highly-paid DBAs teach SQL for an afternoon was that it gave them a good excuse to turn away requests to write simple queries. "We talked about how to sort in descending order in the class I taught. Don't you still have your notes?"
Instead of closing questions as "too basic", why not close them as duplicates?
I'm envisioning either a single question like "How do I teach my programmer co-workers SQL?" or several questions on the order of "What are the different ways to join two tables?" These need not be Community Wiki (at least not immediately), but they should be laser-focused on teaching concepts rather than using them. If there are already a category of question where learning a basic concept would solve the OP's problem, work to get the general question asked and answered canonically.
Why not migrate to SO?
First, take a gander at Shog9's seminal blog post: Respect the community—your own, and others’. To slightly paraphrase:
Be a bit jealous of your profession.
Programmers and DBAs often work closely together and have similar goals, methods, and tools. But programmers have fundamentally a different mindset that does not always mesh with the relational model. If you spend any time with database interface code, you have probably seen things like using a loop instead of a WHERE
clause. The only thing worse than forcing DBAs to teach basic SQL is letting programmers do it.
too basic
. A key stroke was the key of knowledge for that question. I think a "Wall of Shame" might be in order, or at least "Don't let this happen to you" section under FAQ. Oh yea, closing by reason of insanity... eh too basic would be great.homer-simpson
tag with a sound effect ( youtube.com/watch?v=OCmuATH2yzo ) ?