Do You Need to Learn to Write SQL Queries?

I'm an old timer... when I started in the industry years ago, I learned how to create Data Models and write SQL. Yes, yes, I admit, it wasn't the first thing, and it was after I dropped the punch cards on the floor at university...! Didn't we all? In fact I taught SQL for quite a few years before I moved on to teaching application development using the various tools offered by Oracle. By the time I left Oracle, nearly 20 years on, the developers were all learning Java, but we all still need SQL.

Generally, if we're putting data into a relational, SQL-based, database and then querying the results, we probably need to know some SQL.  I know that's a pretty broad statement, but if you're an application developer and you need to get at data by writing ad hoc queries, it's key to be able to write good SQL.