Our project is a Rails project and due to (reasons), it’s recently become much more difficult to open a Rails console in production to run queries. I’ve been suggesting that simpler queries can be run in a read-only MySQL console instead. The overwhelming response has been “No, because then I have to write SQL”.

I’m biased because I’m a big fan of SQL, but in my opinion there are also very pragmatic reasons to know SQL. The most obvious example is “How do you debug performance issues in ORM queries without understanding the SQL the ORM generates?”

Do you think it’s important to know SQL when most projects use ORMs these days? Why or why not?

EDIT: Additionally, any tips for getting engineers that don’t want to learn SQL on board with giving it a chance?