18  Why learn SQL Language?

Reason 1: SQL is popular and widely used

SQL is the number 8 in the tiobe index. Note that, SQL is new in this list since it was not considered programming language before 2018. But as same web page says

The programming language SQL was added to the TIOBE index in 2018 after somebody pointed out that SQL is Turing Complete. So although this language is very old, it has only a short history in the index.

SQL Tetris in Postgresql for turing complete example

Reason 2: SQL is widely asked in job advertisements

• stepstone.de Germany
• indeed.com USA
• kariyer.net Türkiye

Reason 3: SQL is used in places other than databases

SQL widely used in data science with databases and in memory data frames. Data frames are in memory tables. Both python and R has different data frame implementations. You could use SQL to create data frames from databases and query data frames themselves. See below:

• Query python pandas data frame

• Query R Data frame

SQL is also used for other use cases like querying logs.

• Query logs using SQL via log parser

Also, querying csv and excel files using SQL is possible.

• Query csv files using SQL

• Query excel files using SQL

• osquery: Query system data using SQL

osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This allows you to write SQL queries to explore operating system data. With osquery, SQL tables represent abstract concepts such as running processes, loaded kernel modules, open network connections, browser plugins, hardware events or file hashes.

Reason 4: SQL is better compared to newer query languages

See below:

• I don’t need your query language