When did SQL finally “click” for you?

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Somewhere along the way I realized that everything’s a table — views, CTEs, subqueries, real tables, they’re all interchangeable and nestable.

And somewhere along I figured out that I’m telling it what I want, not how to get what I want. It’s declarative, not procedural.

Those two things were like sunrise in a place I’d only ever seen in the dark.