What should a WordPress developer know about MySQL? [closed]

Questions like this usually yield a lot of discussions, but let me give it a shot:

If you’re talking about SQL queries:

  • If you’re only adding content, managing plugins, themes and WordPress updates, there’s a 99.9% chance that you will never need to write a single line of it. I don’t want to put 100% only for cosmetics 🙂
  • If you are developing (or just tweaking existing) themes, there’s also a big chance that you will not need SQL queries, unless you’re developing advanced themes which will require new database tables, etc.
  • If you’re developing plugins, especially advanced ones, there’s a big chance that you will need them (depending on the plugin, this may not be the case at all, though). But on the other hand, if you’re developing plugins and advanced themes, it is likely that you already know SQL needed to perform basic operations such as create table, insert, update, etc.

If you’re talking about managing MySQL database, it is also unlikely that you will need to know anything about it, unless some error occurs (usually during WordPress transfers when you need to change URL or you forget username and password so you want to change those through database). But even if you to get your hands dirty, many hosting companies offer cPanel where you can perform a number of tasks without writing a single line of SQL code.

Because a WordPress developer is a very broad term – some people who only input text and update plugins consider themselves as “developers”.

Nowadays, there are plugins for everything – you can do advanced SQL queries without needing to know what SQL actually is! How? you can use plugins such as Better Search Replace that work just like search-and-replace in Microsoft Word, but actually perform quite advanced queries under the hood. Also, I remember the days when you couldn’t perform a simple WordPress transfer if not exporting and importing database manually through phpMyAdmin or in other ways. Now you have plugins for complete WordPress transfers, even for complicated ones where again, you don’t need need to know what MySQL is.

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