Agreed. I think with DB's in particular a sound understanding of how they do their business is very useful. Both in DB design and in writing efficient queries. In fact the number of times that I've heard people say "I dont need to know how DB's work, its a black box" was a motivation for writing this node.

As is my current situation of helping people who write code that uses Apples WebObjects java framework. WO presents objects to the programmer that represents database rows - but the programmer has no control over how these rows are fetched. In general it works OK, but when it doesn't it's a major PITA to try to find a way to make it work at a reasonable speed.

Michael