5 Essential SQL Skills Every Developer should know
There's nothing new or exciting about relational databases. We abstract them away with ORMS, grudgingly write a query here or there, but generally try to forget about them entirely. Then the performance and scalability problems begin. “Shading, the secret ingredient to the web-scale sauce” often won't help us.
The database is at the heart of nearly every system we build. Reading data and writing data account for the majority of performance bottlenecks. When it comes to SQL and relational databases, the syntax is easy, but the concepts often aren't. The most important knowledge is not obvious but it is necessary to make the right design, query, and optimization decisions.
Indexing, a glimpse under the hood of the storage engine and the query optimizer, and some best practices are all you need to know bring your DB skills head and shoulders above your peers and ready to build bigger, better, faster apps.
About Michael Carducci
Michael Carducci spent years learning to see things as they actually are; first as a magician, then as a software architect, now as both simultaneously. And somehow that’s not even the whole story.
He’s the author of Mastering Software Architecture (Apress, 2025) and is currently writing The Semantic Layer. He has spent over 25 years following interesting problems; through roles from individual contributor to CTO and back again, across industries and continents.
As a speaker, he applies the same toolkit he uses in close-up magic: attention, misdirection, timing, storytelling, and the instinct to take the long way around when that’s where the truth lives. Audiences at hundreds of conferences across four continents have described his talks as the kind that change how you think about a problem rather than just what you know about it.
He also makes YouTube videos about technology and curiosity with his wife Kate, because some ideas are too important (or too interesting!) to leave only in conference rooms.
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