Do I need to learn database to become a web developer?

There are enough components to creating a website that you can safely work in one or two areas of expertise without needing to know all of them. However, in order to communicate with other members of your team it's a good idea to have at least a basic understanding of how these other components work, and a sense of how all the components come together as a whole. From a career longevity standpoint, my advice would be to always gravitate toward the higher level skills and technologies. That's where the human work is still needed. I hear the rest is being done by computers these days.

As a java programmer, JavaDB / Derby is my personal choice and it works good and has great documentation.

Being an expert is not necessary but having a good grasp at the concepts of databases and knowledge of SQL is always helpful.

There is absolutely no need to learn database technologies to become a web developer. In both my current role and my previous role I was in no way required to know the nuances of databases to excel at my role.I will take just a moment to step back and say that knowledge of databases can be extremely helpful. Databases are powerful tools that abstract away some of the most difficult problems revolving around data storage, organization, and retrieval.Dataless ApplicationsAssuming you’re not going to get someone else to handle a database you have one option in building applications to be “dataless”. Depending on the nature of your application this could be relatively trivial - not every application requires users to be logged in, information to be saved to a server, etc.If there is still some amount of data to be dealt with it may be enough to allow users to work with application state until they’re happy and then allow them to download that state such that they can upload it again at a future point to pick up where they left off. That being said, this tends to make for a poor user experience (unless you’re selling the fact that you don’t retain data).Roll your own Data ManagementThat being said, if you’re going to need to be dealing with lots of data you’re going to need to organize it somehow. Without leaning on a database you’re going to want to dive deep into Algorithms and Data Structures to learn how to efficiently store, manage, and retrieve data by hand.This can actually be somewhat fun - most people tend to forget how to do these things by hand because they have databases and it could be a fun way to get ready for future interviews where these kinds of problems are commonplace. Implementing your own hash tables, advanced trees (red-black tree, b-tree, r-tree if you want to do geo), etc. would be an exercise most only scratch on during a CS degree. As well, you’ll learn a lot about managing file systems, memory, etc. on servers and consider how to prevent data loss (i.e. producing backups) as well as deal with making the data accessible across multiple servers.Ultimately, you’ll possibly wind up basically writing your own database. Which is pretty cool. And perhaps a fresh take on present-day database needs may prompt you to build a modern database that fills a need and can market it to the masses, making money training people to use it… like MongoDB. Or make it proprietary and sell slaves that run it for companies… like Oracle. Who knows?Regardless of whether you choose to learn databases or not, web development is a wide field with many possibilities.

I’d say SQL knowledge is really important for web development work.Websites fundamentally present information to end users. Unless you’re working in a very simple environment most often this information will reside in a database.I work for an arts organization and am required to do quite a bit of web development. My organization (like many) uses a Content Management System (CMS) to manage content on the web site. The CMS stores content in a database and provides simple methods to display the content on our site. But, I am often called on to present this information in ways the CMS isn’t capable of (like displaying individualized content dependent on which customer is logged in). That requires an SQL query.My organization has 4 databases feeding the website. They provide for customer communications, ticket sales, and presentation of marketing and archival material. I have written dozens of SQL queries and procedures to support this.I don’t consider myself a database expert but I’ve certainly had to learn the basics to be an effective web developer.MySQL and Microsoft SQL are very popular back end systems for web sites.

It depends entirely on what you want to develop.You don’t necessarily need to learn how to use databases if you are entirely a front end developer, In fact most Database would require you to use a back end language too so you would probably need to learn something like PHP along side it.I would recommend you learn how to use databases anyway as it is an invaluable tool to have when it comes to development.Learn a bit of PHP and Learn MySQL - Pretty standard stuff when it comes to database and will head you in the right direction.