Except that I have coworkers that have no clue whatsoever and ran into deadlocks. Hmmm.. Deadlocks? That's probably a transaction problem. MS SQL is buggy, right? We just don't use transations anymore and pass on the wisdom that transactions are slow and don't work. The _transactions_ cause deadlocks. Evil transactions..

SQL works well, if you invest time understanding the theory and the limitations. If you care about the implementation you're going to use (whether it's MySQL, MS SQL, PostgreSQL or whatnot).

Unfortunately my rather sad experience is that people give a damn about it and will use the trial&error approach, until they cannot reproduce deadlocks/critical errors in their local 'runs on my Thinkpad' VM.

(I really need to quit)