“The primary benefit of SQL is that it’s understood by all data professionals: data scientists, data engineers, analytics engineers, data analysts, DB admins, a

“The primary benefit of SQL is that it’s understood by all data professionals: data scientists, data engineers, analytics engineers, data analysts, DB admins, and many business analysts.“ No, the primary benefit of using SQL is not SQL itself but the “free features” you get with the RDBMS you’re using. Enforcement of primary keys, automatic data type conversions, free transactions! and rollbacks ... and the sheer gift that is set-based operations on large chunks of data. It is just plain stupid to want to code the transformations or insertion of millions of rows iteratively than to rely the implicit rollback power of an INSERT statement. Rule # 1 in my projects: Avoid getting sexy in code, use the RDBMS for all transformations post staging. Always stage to RDBMS “as is” (data warts and all). Cleanup with SQL and stored procedures. This way you can SQL query the whole original format and figure out the best cleanup and transformations needed.