Our biggest thing here is that we have friendly "competitions" surrounding the SQL database. My co-worker is old-school unix, so he by nature hates the GUI 
Stored Procedures and custom Views created in the DB save us countless man hours and, in my experience, working directly in the DB can really expand your knowledge of the architecture of NPM overall.
I highly recommend every SolarWinds engineer to challenge themselves to learn more SQL. I am by no means a DBA, but I can pull every bit of data you can get from the website, and I can do it faster 90% of the time.