A Guest Post from Jordan Raine, Clio

Jordan Raine is a staff software developer at Clio, the leading provider of legal practice management, client relationship management, and client intake software. Clio is dedicated to helping lawyers meet client needs and run efficient, profitable practices. Jordan wrote this post to help mySQL developers save time/effort and ultimately improve their customers' experience. 

Unlike most code a developer writes, writing SQL only requires us to describe what data we want and not how to get it. When given a query like SELECT id, author_id FROM posts WHERE author_id = 123 ORDER BY id, you needn’t concern yourself with what indexes are used (if any), what type of sort is used, or any other number of implementation details. Instead, the query optimizer handles this for you. This keeps SQL concise and …