> You can learn something like ~90% of useful SQL in an afternoon.
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.
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
> I really do not think it’s a difficult language to learn.
Of course, everyone in HN is "advanced" so what do I know!
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