Hell yes. Good knowledge of SQL is a superpower and is becoming a rare art form.
The new generation of devs thinks that frameworks and ORMs will do the magic for them at no cost, but they don't. There is no substitute for leveraging your storage engine to the max.
The sad part is that databases have evolved and became much better in the last 20 years (I started with MySQL 3.x), but we just don't use them. Everyone acts like "microservices" solved all of our technical challenges. Right.
In my opinion, the value of a well architected micro service is to figure out how to optimize and leverage the capabilities of the underlying storage engine, while presenting a simple performant and correct API to consumers, while not requiring those consumers to understand the underlying details of the datastore.
I am not talking about the customers. Of course they are not supposed to understand it. I am talking about the system design. And microservices do not solve problems in most companies, just create new ones. Distributed systems did not magically become simpler to reason about just because there is Docker.
The new generation of devs thinks that frameworks and ORMs will do the magic for them at no cost, but they don't. There is no substitute for leveraging your storage engine to the max.
The sad part is that databases have evolved and became much better in the last 20 years (I started with MySQL 3.x), but we just don't use them. Everyone acts like "microservices" solved all of our technical challenges. Right.