how do i learn sql

the language is so terrible and inconsistent. I want to stab out my eyes just reading it. How do I force myself to read the entire thing without having a nervous break down and come to after implementing a full replacement in lisp?

It's stuff like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql#Null_and_three-valued_logic_.283VL.29
There are however disputes about the semantic interpretation of Nulls in SQL because of its treatment outside direct comparisons. As seen in the table above direct equality comparisons between two NULLs in SQL (e.g. NULL = NULL) returns a truth value of Unknown. This is in line with the interpretation that Null does not have a value (and is not a member of any data domain) but is rather a placeholder or "mark" for missing information. However, the principle that two Nulls aren't equal to each other is effectively violated in the SQL specification for the UNION and INTERSECT operators, which do identify nulls with each other.[20]


http://www.sqlite.org/lang_createtable.html
The exception mentioned above is that if the declaration of a column with declared type "INTEGER" includes an "PRIMARY KEY DESC" clause, it does not become an alias for the rowid and is not classified as an integer primary key. This quirk is not by design. It is due to a bug in early versions of SQLite. But fixing the bug could result in very serious backwards incompatibilities. The SQLite developers feel that goofy behavior in a corner case is far better than a compatibility break, so the original behavior is retained. This means that the following three table declarations all cause the column "x" to be an alias for the rowid (an integer primary key):

It's such a simple language, yet it manages to have quirks. Anything rooted in compatibility becomes a mutated mess.