Am I the only full stack dev that likes SQL?

SQL is an incredibly expressive and flexible way to read, store, and update data. It's ubiquitous, so the SQL skills I learned six jobs and three industries ago are still relevant and useful to me today. Relational Databases and SQL are heavy lifters that I often relay upon to build projects and get things done.

No, I'm with you and prefer SQL for many tasks.

SQL got a bad rap in many ways due to security issues, databases in general, and "web-scale".

SQL as a language within other languages is a nightmare from a security standpoint, and if language integrated query was more common across languages earlier on then this wouldn't have been an issue.

Databases generally depend on normalization, but normalization comes with interesting scaling problems and how do you replicate normalized schemas. Thus denormalization became a thing, and then the emergence of NoSQL and document stores started to infect everywhere. The JOIN was a killer too, and then the discipline required to do sharding made it annoying to manage, so easier to manage solutions became a thing.

I'm looking at databases in a different light these days with more appreciation, but now the hot new thing is GraphQL makes things... interesting. I don't view GraphQL as a server-side solution, but a client solution to overcome the limits of HTTP/1.1. However GraphQL clients are exceptionally complicated, and I'm not sure they are worth it. The only problem is that to overcome them requires engineers "to know how to do things", but that is a hostile stance. People want to go fast and make progress, and GraphQL enables that.

Recently I tried using SQL directly on the frontend: https://medium.com/@unodgs/sql-on-the-frontend-react-postgre... as an alternative to GraphQL which I also find too complicated. You might find this interesting.

I'm using similar security tricks to you: read-only queries with a time limit, against SQLite rather than PostgreSQL.

More here: https://simonwillison.net/2018/Oct/4/datasette-ideas/ and https://github.com/simonw/datasette