Another option is to learn Graph Databases. I notice there's still a big shortage in people with Graph DB experience, and they're not that hard to learn. Try Neo4J, for example.
As a self taught developer I also found Neo4j's query language (Cypher) to be way easier to read than sql. Especially for building complex relationships between data which I find to be kinda a pain in sql. Also the web interface for viewing your database is really easy to use. Although I should say I've switched to using more sql databases over the past year or two because there are way more hosting solutions that support them out of the box.
Exactly. SQL is great for data that's mostly tabular, but despite their name, relational databases are not great at dealing with relations. We had some queries that required 10 joins. The same query in Cypher is trivial.
But yes, hosting solutions are terrible at supporting graph databases. Some do have a thin Graph DB layer (often using Gremlin as QL) over a Mongo-like database, but it's not the same thing.
