I never encountered SQL or at all in my CS education. I got pretty good at Scala for Scalding MapReduce before writing my first SQL query. Learning the basics o

I never encountered SQL or at all in my CS education. I got pretty good at Scala for Scalding MapReduce before writing my first SQL query. Learning the basics only took a few days after that. If someone has enough understanding of data and CS fundamentals to be very good at Spark/Scala, learning SQL isn't going to be much of a barrier for them. I find that the bigger problem is usually people who have a very strong understanding of SQL but no clue as to the resources needed to perform different kinds of operations.