Agreed across the board. Server work is my sweet spot and it's unusual to do it without a database that Rules Them All. In 1990 I was one of the founding members of Microsoft's SQL Server group, back when they were repackaging an older version of Sybase, and knowing databases has done me a lot more good than just understanding data modeling.

I've done page-load optimizations that were at the level of miracle mostly by working with the schema.

Love databases.