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Any reccomendations for resources for learning SQL?

NecrosaroIII

Ultimate DQ Fan
I'm currently taking an online class to learn SQL, but the teacher kind of fucking sucks. In suppliment to the class, I was wondering if you guys had any sources for learning online?

-Reccomended books
- Good websites? Especially for practice / exercises.
 
Just to be sure, you are learning actual SQL? Or something like MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL?

Are you taking an online class through school or you have already found your own course for learning?
If you want to be cheap, check out udemy. If you create a new account, every course is only 12 bucks (Just make a new account anytime you want another course IMO)

If you are more serious, and have some extra money to throw at learning this language; I would check out CBTnuggets. It is a bit expensive, but I have been using this for studying for an upcoming Linux exam and the videos are SUPER digestable.

Only other thing I can recommend is to rent a VPS or AWS instance and start playing with it yourself, can only learn so much from videos/books. Majority of that learning comes from practice! Good luck!
 

Hudo

Gold Member
As an additional tip: If you wanna have a better understanding of SQL and similar (relational) query languages, study first-order logic. It'll help tremendously when dealing with databases and knowledge bases in general.
 

Elcid

Banned
As an additional tip: If you wanna have a better understanding of SQL and similar (relational) query languages, study first-order logic. It'll help tremendously when dealing with databases and knowledge bases in general.
This is a good suggestion ^^^.

One more bit of advice. Once you're done with the courses, I would grab a large set of data and create a database to practice your queries in. I ended up using the vaccine adverse event reaction (VAERS) data because it's provided in CSVs and was super easy to import as tables.
 
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NecrosaroIII

Ultimate DQ Fan
Or SQLite.

But yeh, I was thinking the same thing, it's rare that you would learn SQL in its original form these days.

NecrosaroIII NecrosaroIII What exactly are you learning this for? What course is it part of?

I want to transition into a data analysis position at my company. I'm taking a course through a community college.

We're learning MariaDB, and using PHPmyAdmin for exercises.
 
I want to transition into a data analysis position at my company. I'm taking a course through a community college.

We're learning MariaDB, and using PHPmyAdmin for exercises.
Ahh yes, MariaDB and PHP go together quite often. You are learning MySQL and its derivatives, this is quite different compared to straight SQL.

I will second codecademy as a fantastic resource, though I don't find all of there content easy to digest.
Other than the above mentioned resources for studying, I would strong recommend finding ways to actually work with MariaDB/MySql, etc. Setting up your own little environment will help A LOT compared to straight studying!
 

NecrosaroIII

Ultimate DQ Fan
Signed up for Code Academy. Man. What a resource. Thanks guys. Code Academy teached SQLite and PostgreSQL. Is it a big jump from PostgreSQL to MySQL?
 
Signed up for Code Academy. Man. What a resource. Thanks guys. Code Academy teached SQLite and PostgreSQL. Is it a big jump from PostgreSQL to MySQL?
Ultimately this depends on what you are actually working on.. From my experience in the IT field, it isn't very common to use just MySQL generally it depends on the task at hand. Majority of these different "Sql" databases for the most part, work similarly.

"Postgres is an object-relational database, while MySQL is a purely relational database. This means that Postgres includes features like table inheritance and function overloading, which can be important to certain applications. Postgres also adheres more closely to SQL standards "
 

GamesAreFun

Banned
Signed up for Code Academy. Man. What a resource. Thanks guys. Code Academy teached SQLite and PostgreSQL. Is it a big jump from PostgreSQL to MySQL?

No, they're very similar in concepts.

MySQL (in general) is a bit simpler than Postgres, with fewer features. If you write a SQL query for Postgres, it's largely interchangeable with MySQL, outside of a few "non-standard" SQL functions (e.g. doing a "cross-tabulation" query typically has a different function name in each of the popular databases).
 

Elcid

Banned
Signed up for Code Academy. Man. What a resource. Thanks guys. Code Academy teached SQLite and PostgreSQL. Is it a big jump from PostgreSQL to MySQL?
I believe all the big companies are using T-SQL which is the Microsoft standard. You can download SQL server for free and play in there. As for Postgres vs MySQL, I'd probably go with Postgres.
 
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