I use SQL a ton in a Support Engineering role at a SaaS company and am studying for the Oracle SQL fundamentals certification. I know this would increase my opportunities to move to Dev in my company, but would like to know how common/useful SQL knowledge is in Dev across the industry. Thanks!
Dev roles vary, so it really depends on a team or individual's focus. Teams that manage or have a telemetry footprint inside a service use some SQL variant, but I would say rarely is it used alone. In most cases devs are working across language types - java, C#, SQL (and its many variants), etc to solve problems. It depends on the problem to be solved.
at my old job the dbas wouldn't write stored procedures for devs unless it was something really complicated. I pretty much went from hating SQL to writing quite a bit over the years. now I do strictly UI and never really have to touch the backed apis or implementations
I am a big data ml engineer and being a sql monkey is majority of my job
I'm working on trying to move into a more development role as well, ( I think data science might make more sense due to my business background). I have a decent understanding of SQL and am working to learn Python and Hadoop so I can access and manipulate the data in ways needed. I feel like for the most part in data science you are just cleaning crappy data using python to do that and load it back up
SQL knowledge is very useful. You certainly won't be wasting your time learning it, but don't expect it alone to ease your transition into a general software development role.
Thank you. What language would you recommend that I study in order to ease a transition into development?
Depends on what they're using in your target job. If you don't know that, C# and Java are both solid middle ground choices. Pick based on platform. JavaScript if you're interested in more web stuff. There are hundreds of language / library / framework combinations so a strong understanding of first principles and technical agility is what you're really going for.