I’ve probably said it before, but in my current job I get to learn a lot of new things all the time, as a web developer I’ve self-taught myself a lot of my current skill set. One of which is MySQL. I had a pretty basic understanding of SQL and simplistic queries. I’ve never really pushed myself into going further into bigger and nastier queries. Though, I did pick up a good piece of advice at an open source conference I attended. The speaker mentioned that independent of whatever language you are programming in, your database engine (he was speaking of MySQL) will do it better every time. Well the more I dig into it, the more I realize just how correct that statement is. I’ve been living under the impression that I can deal with data better outside of the database engine versus generating a better query to get the right data. I know that makes me sound lazy or dumb – but I think a lot of web developers fall into this when there’s no real reason to push the limits. I mean I could probably catch a lot of you selecting * in your statements huh?