a couple of weeks ago i popped on to irc.freenode.net, #mysql to ask a question about something that i couldn’t figure out. as it happens, nobody else could figure it out either so i felt a little better about it. i wound up staying in the channel to see if i could help anyone else out, but also to see if i could pick up pointers from the other people in the channel.

so far, it has proved to be pretty helpful. since i’m stronger on DBAish things than db programming, but the other guys on the channel seem to be pretty badass at writing SQL, i’ve started to learn new things.

i had joins finally make sense the other day (for which i could kinda parrot what they were for, but had no concept in my head of how they actually worked — like, you know a steering wheel turns a car, but how does it do it?), and this morning i figured out someone’s question by reading about HAVING, and so now we both learned something new.

awesome.