I’m absolutely biased as a data engineer who loves SQL, but there are some good reasons why SQL has been the de facto standard for interacting with databases since the 80s.

One of its draws is that it’s easy to understand. I can show a stakeholder that I’m selecting “sum(sale_amount) from transactions where date=yesterday” and they understand it. Many analysts are even able to write complicated queries when they don’t know anything else about programming.

Since it’s declarative, you rarely have to think about all the underlying fuckery that lets you query something like terabytes of data in redshift in minutes.

Debugging is often pretty nice too. I can take some query that didn’t do what it was supposed to and run it over and over in a console until the output is right.