[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