New zine: Become a SELECT Star!

A new zine turns SQL inside out

Wizard Zines has released “Become a SELECT Star!,” a $12 PDF on SQL that’s available from wizardzines.com. Buyers can read it on screen or print it out, and it joins the existing bundle of all seven zines.

The zine grew out of the author’s experience writing a lot of SQL at a previous job, mostly for machine-learning work. That daily exposure surfaced what she calls “weird things” about SQL — points that rarely get clear treatment in tutorials. Two examples: SQL queries don’t actually start with SELECT, and NULL semantics aren’t intuitive at first encounter. The zine goes back to basics to explain questions such as the difference between WHERE and HAVING, the core idea behind indexes, and how to write a join.

The motivation for teaching SQL is practical: there are many SQL databases in the wild, and some, like BigQuery and Redshift, are extremely powerful. Knowing SQL gives you access to those data warehouses, where a single query can crunch on the order of 10 billion rows quickly.

Become a SELECT Star! relies heavily on worked examples. In fact, the author says she spent more time on the examples than in any previous zine. Each one clearly shows the query, the table it runs against, and the result:

That example-driven approach didn’t stop at the page. All queries in the zine are real and runnable, so the author built a companion SQL playground. It runs the same example tables from the zine in the browser, using SQLite compiled to WebAssembly. Building it wasn’t complicated — just minimal JavaScript/CSS and vue.js. The sample data is necessarily small, since printed SQL tables can only fit so much; the largest table in the example set has about nine rows.

The next zine will likely be about containers, a more traditional systems topic. Planned material covers namespaces, cgroups, and the rationale for containers in the first place.