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At 50 Years Old, Is SQL Becoming a Niche Skill?


This post was originally triggered – and I choose that word carefully – by a recent experience on a cloud cost-optimisation project. These experiences prompted me to consider how things…

As part of the project that provoked me, I was researching the topic of cloud cost analysis and was struck by how many people complained that the tools the big three providers give you are not adequate to the task. Once this was built I could write all sorts of queries like ‘Compare costs per GCP service/project/sku with previous month, showing any percentage change greater than x’, modifying them at will to hone in on the specific data I was interested in much faster and more effectively than could be achieved with GUIs. While working on this with a very bright and knowledgeable younger colleague, I was struck by the fact that he’d never needed to learn SQL, and he made sense of these queries by comparing them to other JSON-based *QLs that he’d come across (PromQL, GraphQL etc).

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