[mmcdermott]

What's interesting is that I had my one database course in college that taught relational algebra. We had access to an Oracle database against which we probably only wrote a handful of queries. Almost all of the work was, well, math and theory.

When I got my first development job, I started out scribbling relational algebra on scrap paper and then translating it to SQL. I got faster and faster until I could think in SQL.