[johnnyhillbilly]

I believe the first thing to understand about SQL is that everything is a table (aka relation). Once one understands that, the idea of modelling entities as relations and relationships as references starts making sense. Also, the tenets of normalization become understandable on an intuitive level.

Sadly, many IT professionals lack the intuition on this.

SQL is a highly sophisticated language since many years. Having done insane amounts of data prepping and validation for analytics, I will attest to this.

However, if I am writing software in .NET, I would trade away SQL for LINQ any day of the week. (Preferrably by means of some sort of intuitive DAL.)