SQL is a language that will take you half a day to learn and you will use it for the rest of your life. Since it varies from platform to platform you better pick the one you are going to use (Postgres, mySQL, etc.) -- Don't fall into those ORM which hides the database behind a "nice" api. for programming I would suggest you Python. The best place to start is by looking at http://webpy.org which is a compact yet robust web framework in Python.

good-luck