As a CIO, I’m confronted daily with a paradoxical situation: we live in a world where data is omnipresent, structuring our businesses and guiding our decisions, but very few people actually know how to interrogate it. This observation led me to a profound conviction: basic mastery of SQL should be as fundamental as knowing how to use Excel or write a professional email.

The reign of structured data

Data is the new oil of our economy. It’s everywhere – in our management systems, our marketing tools, our business applications. Every day, crucial decisions are made on the basis of this data. Yet how many professionals can access this information directly, without going through a technical intermediary?

I regularly see situations where managers go through three or four different contacts to obtain information that could have been retrieved in a few lines of SQL. This is not just a waste of time and efficiency – it’s also a loss of opportunity for analysis and in-depth understanding of their business.

A strategic investment for the company

Companies invest heavily in data analysis tools, sophisticated dashboards and expensive BI solutions. But paradoxically, they often neglect the most fundamental investment: training their staff in the basics of SQL.

This training should be as much a part of the onboarding process as the presentation of in-house tools. It only takes a few hours to master the basics, and the return on investment is immediate. Annual training courses could also include SQL modules tailored to the specific needs of each business.

Really useful fundamentals

Mind you, I’m not talking about becoming a database expert or knowing how to design complex systems. I’m talking about acquiring the fundamental skills needed to query existing data. In practical terms, this boils down to a few key concepts:

• The SELECT command for selecting relevant information
• The WHERE clause for filtering according to specific criteria
• JOINs to link different data sources
• GROUP BY to synthesize information

With these four concepts, you can already answer 80% of everyday questions about your data. It’s no more complex than learning the basic Excel formulas – it’s just less widespread.

Above all, with the advent of ChatGPT and other tools of this type, generating queries has become particularly simple. But you still need to be able to understand them…

A more natural language than you might think

The beauty of SQL lies in its natural readability. Let’s take a concrete example: imagine you want to know the sales per product for the last quarter. In SQL, this is written :

SELECT 
    product_name,
    SUM(amount) as revenue
FROM sales
WHERE sales_date >= '2024-01-01'
GROUP BY product_name
ORDER BY revenue DESC;

This query is easy to understand, even for beginners. It follows a natural logic:

• “SELECT product_name”: I want to see the product names
• “SUM(amount) as revenue”: I want the sum of the amounts, which I call sales.
• “FROM sales”: I want to search the sales table
• “WHERE date_vente >= ‘2024-01-01′”: I only take sales since January 1st
• “GROUP BY product_name”: group by product
• “ORDER BY revenue DESC”: I order from largest to smallest

It’s almost plain English! This natural readability is one of SQL’s great assets for its widespread adoption in the enterprise.

Building bridges between businesses

One of the most underestimated benefits of the democratization of SQL is its impact on inter-departmental communication. When a field salesperson understands SQL, his or her communication with the technical team takes on a new dimension. He no longer simply asks for data – he can specify exactly what he’s looking for, understand technical constraints, and even propose solutions.

This mutual understanding creates a real synergy. Technical teams are no longer perceived as a mysterious black box, and operational professions gain credibility in their exchanges with IT. I’ve seen some amazing collaborations emerge from this shared understanding – sales people suggesting relevant improvements to dashboards, marketing managers actively participating in the definition of performance indicators.

Understanding SQL means, for example, understanding why you shouldn’t just fill in anything in certain forms (how many times have I had to deal with situations where a company employee, out of a desire to move quickly, simply filled in the first and last name in the same field on a form, even though the form explicitly distinguished the first and last name fields), or why certain data is not as easily cross-referenced as you might think.

Independence from market solutions

Another major advantage of mastering SQL is the independence it provides from commercial solutions. Of course, off-the-shelf tools have their uses, but they often come with their limitations:

• Significant licensing costs
• functionalities that are sometimes too rigid
• Vendor dependency
• Limitations in data exploitation

With SQL, your teams can create their own analyses, adapt queries to their specific needs, and even develop simple in-house solutions perfectly adapted to their requirements.

Practical challenges for SMEs

Let’s talk frankly about potential obstacles. Yes, the democratization of SQL raises questions of security and data access. But let’s be realistic: in the majority of SMEs, these issues are already not optimally addressed. Users share Excel extracts by email, store sensitive data in local files, and bypass official processes for pragmatic reasons.

Training employees in SQL paradoxically makes it easier to control these practices. Rather than letting everyone cobble together their own solutions, it’s better to provide a structured framework:

• Pre-configured SQL views to limit access to sensitive data
• Good querying practices to avoid overloading servers
• Clear documentation of available data
• Simple but effective access management procedures

Beyond technology: a thinking tool

Learning SQL does much more than simply extract data. It develops a structured way of thinking about information. When you write an SQL query, you need to :

1. Clearly identify the information you’re looking for
2. Understand the relationships between different data sources
3. Define precise filtering criteria
4. Choose the appropriate level of aggregation

These skills are invaluable well beyond the technical aspect. They improve communication with technical teams, enable greater autonomy in analysis and contribute to more informed decision-making.

Conclusion

SQL is not just a technical language – it’s a tool for empowerment in a data-driven world. Its basic mastery should be as much a part of the skill base of any modern professional as office automation or e-mail.

The challenge is not to turn every employee into a database expert, but to give everyone the keys to accessing and understanding the data relevant to their business. It’s a modest investment with a considerable return, at both individual and organizational levels.

In a context where SMEs are seeking to optimize their resources and gain in efficiency, SQL training represents an obvious strategic investment. It breaks down silos, empowers teams, and creates a truly data-driven corporate culture.