Re: Hire a Perl programmer and get a database guru free?

[benn]

There's the old quote about 'all programming is database programming' - obviously we all deal with manipulation of data structures in some way, and just about every programmer I've interviewed in the last five years has worked with one DBMS or another. I've found the only thing to be careful of though is that some programmers are more inclined to manipulate the data through Perl than through SQL - doing a big 'select *' then parsing/filtering the results in various clever and obfu ways, rather than letting the DB / SQL do the work. A day spent getting a programmer to play with 'advanced' SQL (and mostly it only seems to take one day - if they've got a handle on Perl, then SQL is easy peasy <g>) can reap huge rewards.