you still very much need to understand SQL and the underlying structure of your data
That's good to hear! Though in my experience of interacting with people who have learned development in last 3-5 years, many of them are very oblivious to basic database concepts. They mostly think in terms of the object in the code, relying on the framework to take care of the database. It might even generate the sql that they just need to execute. But anyone who's worked with production database from before the advent of frameworks like Rails etc. knows that the only thing worse than messing up an sql statement is running auto generated sql.
That's good to hear! Though in my experience of interacting with people who have learned development in last 3-5 years, many of them are very oblivious to basic database concepts. They mostly think in terms of the object in the code, relying on the framework to take care of the database. It might even generate the sql that they just need to execute. But anyone who's worked with production database from before the advent of frameworks like Rails etc. knows that the only thing worse than messing up an sql statement is running auto generated sql.