How does one go about becoming a total master at this? I find that, out of all the programming that I do, I love working with SQL the most and I want to dive deeper into it.
Exposure, exploration, and experience.
I started my career in a role similar to the one it sounds like you're in today: at first, I was just another developer. Then I was the developer who knew and liked SQL pretty well. At some point, there was a shift where I started spending more time helping people do database-y things than I did developing. Subsequently, keeping our PostgreSQL instances happy was officially made my job. Then I got a job with the title DBA based on that experience. Though I've moved on a couple times since, that's the hat I've worn for the better part of a decade now. It's not always the most exciting work (and when it is exciting, it's often enough the wrong kind of exciting), but it's almost always interesting.
It probably helped that I've always been a technologist for sake of fascination with technology, who happened to realize you could also make a decent living with those skills. I'd started playing with Linux in the late '90s, for example, out of a "What's this all about?" sort of curiosity. Net, I almost accidentally ended up checking nearly every box in that "ideal administrator" section. My C is pretty rusty, and my network admin-fu is weak, but I don't think the breadth of my skills are unrelated to people (management and technical folk alike) at my last several jobs telling me I'm the best DBA they've ever worked with.
Exposure, exploration, and experience.
I started my career in a role similar to the one it sounds like you're in today: at first, I was just another developer. Then I was the developer who knew and liked SQL pretty well. At some point, there was a shift where I started spending more time helping people do database-y things than I did developing. Subsequently, keeping our PostgreSQL instances happy was officially made my job. Then I got a job with the title DBA based on that experience. Though I've moved on a couple times since, that's the hat I've worn for the better part of a decade now. It's not always the most exciting work (and when it is exciting, it's often enough the wrong kind of exciting), but it's almost always interesting.
It probably helped that I've always been a technologist for sake of fascination with technology, who happened to realize you could also make a decent living with those skills. I'd started playing with Linux in the late '90s, for example, out of a "What's this all about?" sort of curiosity. Net, I almost accidentally ended up checking nearly every box in that "ideal administrator" section. My C is pretty rusty, and my network admin-fu is weak, but I don't think the breadth of my skills are unrelated to people (management and technical folk alike) at my last several jobs telling me I'm the best DBA they've ever worked with.