[crispyambulance]

    > You can learn something like ~90% of useful SQL in an afternoon.

Oh, HELL NO!

It's an ugly little language that one has to come back to and re-learn over and over at different levels of sophistication. Nothing wrong with that, but to suggest it's trivial is a gross mischaracterization.

[bluefirebrand]

> different levels of sophistication

Most of those are not necessary for 90% of use cases

I'm not taking the piss either

All most people really need to know is table CRUD, row CRUD, and a bit about indices.

For anything more advanced you'll need a DBA, but IMO you unless you are scaling like crazy you will not need much more than that for SQL knowledge. It's really, really not that complex for most use cases

[therealdrag0]

You should also learn joins and ordering/pagination. But that can be on day 2 :)

[bluefirebrand]

I consider those to be part of basic Table CRUD, but yes, absolutely. :)

[sgarland]

I’m a DBRE, and also happen to like SQL. With that as a disclaimer, I really do not think it’s a difficult language to learn. Learning the intricacies of your RDBMS’ behavior for various functions (like MySQL’s ORDER BY and GROUP BY optimizations) is complicated, but that’s what docs are for.

[crispyambulance]

   > I really do not think it’s a difficult language to learn.

Neither do I, but there's huge distances between "spend-an-afternoon-intro-on-it" and "learn-it-well-enough-for-occasional-work" and "learn-it-enough-to-build-serious-databases".

Of course, everyone in HN is "advanced" so what do I know!

[bluefirebrand]

> learn-it-enough-to-build-serious-databases

This is more about infrastructure than SQL though. You don't need to know any fancy SQL to do streaming replication or whatever, for instance.

You're correct that being good at Managing Data is a complex domain with a lot of gnarly bits, but I was talking about Writing SQL being fairly easy