I'm sure it's needed by a large percentage of programmers, but maybe that's my bias speaking.
That was a fun course where I learnt horribly bad patterns like "your data forms a key so you should use that as your key instead of having a surrogate key"
The prof was good at relational algebra, but not designing software
I used SQL all the time in web dev but haven't touched it since going to college. I do embedded so it's just never been necessary.
Now if this is a web dev or data related posting and students are coming in supposedly for this specialty then this ask HN is a little more understandable. Although perhaps poorly worded.
Oh that's cool! I've never worked on that side of things. I assumed SQLite was used in embedded stuff, but I guess not.
SQL was then something that was a side thing in the class that you were supposed to pick up for one of the projects.
We had to learn to normalize schemas in that class. I have yet to come across a team in my career where normalization was understood well enough to where it could be correctly matched to the architecture of the entire system.
The other amazing takeaway was going through the historical failures of hierarchical & graph databases. Since I started working hierarchical databases have come back with tons of hype twice now (once in the late 90s, once in the late 2010s). Both times they failed exactly the same way as history would predict based on what happened in the 60s and 70s that led to the development of relational databases. Sometimes it seems like the industry hype train is completely unaware of computer science.