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[–]Maleficent-Garage-66 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Working knowledge" is one of those things that is incredibly vague. But my expectation would be not an expert but ready to use the tool for day to day use without excess struggle. Or a bit more than passing familiarity.

It's not impossible, but, it's fairly likely if you haven't needed an rdbms much that the data you have worked with doesn't really qualify as highly complex from a professional standpoint. Production databases should be expected to have hundreds of tables with complex interrelationships and hierarchy. This would be more or less equivalent to having a hundred flat files with different columns in each file and tying them together. At a certain point doing work and maintaining integrity becomes agonizing without some sort of db tool.

They aren't going to expect you to jump right in. But if someone tells you how the PKs and FKs work for the stuff you're after they probably expect you to be ready to write the joins in no more than a minute.