SQL is awesome! There are so many different aspects to databases that most don't realise, nor how much it is actually used in companies (literally everywhere in everything).
If you looking into it, find out what you want to do with it, you get the administration side of things; making sure the installations are good, databases are created for maximum performance, security, backup & recovery.
You get the SQL Development (which is more fun for me personally) side, which is mainly writing actual SQL code to do lots n lots of things and how to make **** fast!
Current company working with 2TB databases and ingesting like 5000 rows of data per second, gets fun trying to optimize that!
As for picking a flavour.. ya its hard. I used to be die hard MSSQL, recently been working with PostgreSQL and its bloody awesome, both have pros n cons and both are fantastic. Oracle is just oracle, expensive and you need a freaking guru with 100years experience just to set up your DB else it runs likes a snail. MySQL is rubbish.
Then of course you now have the "big data" trend... whole other ball game and host of technologies.
On a job note, Its extremely hard to find proper competent SQL Developers
Edit: And i wish software engineers knew more SQL! Even just advanced "basics" like what and index is and why you should use it
