Comment by roystonvassey

Same. As a data scientist, I have seen multiple 'analytics workbench' solutions come, go and occasionally stay - Clementine (what is now IBM SPSS), Stata, SAS and its many variants, Statistica and in the recent years, tools built off and designed to make working with data using Python/R.

But, the common workhorse tool that has stayed strong through all these has been the common SQL. Elegant, simple, powerful and thoroughly reliable, it is my primary go-to tool. In an otherwise changing ecosystem, its simplicity and reliability is a boon. Yes, it is primarily because of the nostalgic familiarity but I also believe it continues to be extremely powerful, one that will serve you very well.