Having a solid understanding of SQL and how the database runtime works. I.e. indices, partioniong, materialized vs non-materialized views, etc. It really makes

Having a solid understanding of SQL and how the database runtime works. I.e. indices, partioniong, materialized vs non-materialized views, etc. It really makes a huge difference for software engineers. Lots of software engineers just treat a database as a dumb data store and never leverage even a fraction of its utility. Often times you see a lot of nasty code written in the application layer that could have been handled so much more gracefully and efficiently in the database layer.