Hey! So I'm not an expert, but I'm learning more every day. It sounds like you're conflating three (or more) problems -- knowing if your data is relational in

Hey! So I'm not an expert, but I'm learning more every day. It sounds like you're conflating three (or more) problems -- knowing if your data is relational in its nature, understanding how to efficiently retrieve the data you're looking for and understanding system administration/architecture tasks for a particular system. The reason why I bring this up: my first job out of college was as a (very) junior Oracle DBA. At that particular job, that meant knowing some stuff about data retrieval but knowing much more about performance tuning and the architectural idiosyncrasies of Oracle and lots of Linux stuff. Later I moved into startupland and necessarily learned quite a bit more about the data storage and retrieval patterns popular in web applications. My point is: you might want to pick a particular aspect of databases that you want to learn about and really focus on that -- just like you would for a new programming language or framework. The way I usually do it is by finding a project that seems just a little too hard to be easily in reach and learning everything I can to make it happen. Anyway, good luck and happy learning :-).