ActiveRecord is a great tool, but knowing SQL can help you to build better, faster applications and quickly find answers to common business questions. In this talk you'll see an overview of basic-to-intermediate SQL techniques that you can use to: learn about unfamiliar data sets, identify and resolve slow query problems, quickly build ad-hoc reports, combine multiple tables and perform calculations. Specifically targeted to the Junior Rails Developer, we will explore with non-trivial yet approachable examples and see how learning SQL can help you become a better software developer.