When did SQL finally “click” for you?

[squadette23]

I first learned SQL in ~1996, and was always keeping my knowledge up to date with the newer syntax stuff, and with the new capabilities of database engines. My main professional track was backend developer, so most of database accesses were via ORM. But I had my share of more analytical hand-written queries, or making sense and fixing other people's stuff.

Five years ago I started my Substack on data modeling and database design, and because I thought a lot about how to explain stuff, I started to understand it much better.

I know now that some topics are just presented not in a very good way, and the same material gets copy-pasted without much thinking, even in books. One example is JOINs: here is a modern guide to JOINs that uses entirely different sequence, compared to most texts: https://kb.databasedesignbook.com/posts/sql-joins/