Why Sql Is Important?

When writing an SQL query, you start with SELECT and then FROM because it resembles human language: first, you say what you want to get (for example, a list of names), and then you specify where to get this data from (from the participants table). It’s easier to remember and formulate this way, although all programmers agree that it would be better the other way around — FROM ... SELECT.

When I started programming professionally, I somehow decided that knowing SQL wasn’t necessary at all. For complex questions, there were DBAs, and for simple ones, there were ORMs. SQL seemed too arcane, evoking images of mainframes and punch cards. Then, various NoSQL solutions from CouchDB to MongoDB gained popularity, and I happily switched to document-oriented databases, once again mistakenly deciding that SQL was outdated and not worth my time. A few years later, I evolved into a DevOps and SRE specialist and concluded that I would never need SQL…

Time and experience, of course, proved me wrong. Now, I have to write and analyze SQL queries every day. SQL is used in BigQuery, AWS Athena, Cloudwatch Metrics Insights, and even Grafana. With SQL, you can quickly obtain almost any historical and current information about events in the infrastructure.

In short, I’ve grown older and wiser and finally concluded that SQL is the most essential skill for anyone (not just coders) who works with computers. It’s like ancient magic—not needed by everyone all the time, it looks strange and verbose, but it provides a huge advantage when it comes to analyzing and obtaining specific data.

Not to mention, a kind of SQL (DQL) is used in the Dataview plugin in Obsidian, where I’m writing this text. It’s amusing to see how “old” technologies repeatedly prove their effectiveness despite loud and premature declarations of their demise.