Introduction to SQL Databases - SQL for Beginners

Structured Query Language (SQL or "Sequel") is the way we communicate with a relational database. It's an intuitive and powerful language and mastering it is rapidly becoming a prerequisite for career paths outside of software development.

SQL has been one of the most common skill sets required by employers for software developers for years, according to research published by Indeed. That fact is not likely to change any time soon, as businesses have woken up to the reality that the data they capture, generate, and store has tremendous business value to improve performance and efficiency and uncover new paths for growth.

If you're a software developer just getting started, a Business Analyst, a Test Engineer, Project Manager looking to augment your technical skill set, or a data or financial analyst who works primarily with spreadsheets, you'll benefit from taking this course to learn how you can power up your data skills. We start from the ground up to teach you what a relational database is, how to plan and build a database structure, how to get data into your database, and then how to work with it to retrieve meaningful insights using SQL.

In this course, you will learn:

• What a Relational Database is

• How to install Microsoft SQL Server and SQL Server Management Studio on your local computer

• How to use SQL Server Management Studio to create, explore, and query a database

• How to research SQL Server functionality using the online documentation

• Database Design Techniques including how to diagram a database using an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD)

• The basic database structures: tables, columns, data types, primary keys, and foreign key relationships

• Best practices for how to name your database elements (objects)

• How to learn SQL by automatically generating queries and SQL statements with SQL Server Management Studio

• Inserting data into tables using the INSERT statement

• Retrieving and filtering data using SELECT statements and WHERE clauses

• Extracting data from multiple tables with a single query using INNER JOIN, LEFT JOIN, RIGHT JOIN, FULL JOIN, and CROSS JOIN statements

• Sorting query results

• Aggregating data with aggregate functions like SUM and COUNT and GROUP BY clauses (very important for building reports and summarizing data!)

• Updating and deleting data with UPDATE and DELETE statements

This course is very hands on! It is structured as a series of lectures to help you understand what we'll do with labs, exercises, and quizzes along the way so that you're involved right from the start.