Richie CottonSenior Data Evangelist, DataCamp · Ask me about data and AI upskilling

Is SQL Still Worth Learning in the Age of AI? #shorts

Name: Is SQL Still Worth Learning in the Age of AI? #shorts
Uploaded: 2026-04-18T14:00:26+00:00
Duration: 37 s
Channel: Richie Cotton
Description: Two speakers debate whether SQL matters now that AI writes queries. One argues it's obsolete, but the other insists you need SQL fundamentals to judge…

18 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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Two speakers debate whether SQL matters now that AI writes queries. One argues it's obsolete, but the other insists you need SQL fundamentals to judge whether AI-generated queries actually work and perform well. Understanding data models and how to extract insights stays essential.

Chapters

Is SQL still worth learning at this point when agents can, or well, in, in fact, generative AI in general can write SQL for you?
My personal recommendation is that absolutely. It's more about trying to really understand what your data model is. It's trying to understand the fundamentals of how you gather insights. What is the efficient structure and what happens when you don't have the right efficient structures in place? But you need to understand SQL. So my recommendation is that please continue to learn SQL. SQL has been there for a long time and it'll be there for a lot more time because it's truly the language of data. And in many ways it's been proven over and again that there's no better way to do that than SQL.