First mention of manager in Lesson 3 joins

[bbbowers]

Hi,

I wasn't sure the best way to go about this, so I figured I would open an issue as a discussion around it.

In lesson 3: Combining Data with Joins (https://datacarpentry.org/sql-ecology-lesson/03-sql-joins/index.html) there are two mentions of 'manager':

We use the table.colname format to tell the manager what column in which table we are referring to.
In this case we are telling the manager that we want to combine surveys with species and that the common column is species_id.

My first thought was, what manager? But looking through previous lessons I couldn't find mention of 'manager'. (I suspect this is leftovers from previous language treating our interface with the DB as through a manager ie a DBMS.)

Should 'manager' be replaced, and if so, what should it be replaced with?

Some options:

'SQL' as in lesson 2:

GROUP BY tells SQL what field or fields we want to use to aggregate the data.

Or 'us' as in lesson 1:

The keyword ASC tells us to order it in ascending order.

Or 'query' which might be most ubiquitous.

Thanks for your time!

[jd-foster]

Hi and thanks for taking the time to open this issue.
I agree with you that introducing the term 'manager' out of the blue is pretty distracting to the learner.
Your other examples are also examples of ambiguous terms, and appreciate you drawing attention to them.
My proposal is that all these examples should in fact be changed to a more "active" voice from the perspective of the person writing the query:

table.colname format to tell the manager what column

table.colname format to say what column

GROUP BY tells SQL what field or fields we want to use to aggregate the data.

GROUP BY indicates what field or fields we want to use to aggregate the data.

The keyword ASC tells us to order it in ascending order.

The keyword ASC says we want to order it in ascending order.

Happy to hear your thoughts on whether you think this approach works.