Technical Perspective: #8712;KTELO

When was the last time that you wrote code to implement a join algorithm? Chances are, it was during an undergraduate database class - if at all. The wide availability of database management systems in all their manifestations (admitting a wide definition, to encompass performing look-ups in a spreadsheet) mean that we do not have to (re)implement common operations over and over again. This brings many advantages. We benefit from time savings, both in development time, and also in execution time: we can expect that optimized professional code will outperform our ad-hoc efforts. Moreover, we expect such code to be robust, and less prone to crashing on unexpected inputs. It should produce results that can be relied on to be correct, and handle errors gracefully.