Over the course of my career, I introduced a couple of engineers into the topic of query engines. Every time, I bumped into the same problem: query engines are extremely academic. Despite the fact that industry has over 40 years of expertise, reading foundational papers and then sort of just googling around is the only way to dive deep. Database courses and seminars from Andy Pavlo definitely help, but they are still targeted at academic audience and require a lot of extra reading to be useful.
