I have a huge appreciation for RDBMS engines like SQL Server and others, after spending many college-years during the 80's writing low-level programs to create and process data structures. There's nothing like slogging down that road before becoming a DBA, to understand by RBAR is a four-letter word 😀

I'm not sure that pure programming is completely relevant to being a DBA, but Data Structure and Relational Set theory definitely should be. Every DBA should fundamentally know what a B-Tree is.

IMHO 🙂