[jmathai]

I agree. I see SQL similarly to regular expressions. There's a handful of commands which let you do a lot of stuff.

The hard part in SQL is optimization which requires really understanding how the underlying database engine optimizes and executes the query.

Optimizing complex queries is no joke. It's one of the reasons noSQL seems nice at glance. You can do the optimizations by adding lots of indexes or using application logic. In reality, it's a tradeoff for other problems.