Free SQL and Database Course

SQL is one of the most desired and useful languages that a data scientist — or programmer of any stripe, for the matter — can posses knowledge of.

SQL may well be a data scientist's best friend, and for good reason. 2 very important reasons for this are stated by Jorge Torres in his recent article: first, SQL dominates databases; and second, demand for SQL skills is high, and growing.

Furthermore, data scientist and KDnuggets contributor, Natassha Selvaraj, states the following in a recent tutorial:

The biggest piece of advice I can give aspiring data scientists is to learn SQL. This is an often-overlooked skill by most data science learning providers but is arguably as important as machine learning modeling.

To further quantify, the TIOBE Index for September 2022, an indicator of the popularity of programming languages, places SQL at position number 9 of all programming languages. SQL has benefits not just for data scientists, but for app developers, database managers, back end developers, and more.

If you want to drill SQL and relational database management systems (RDBMSs) into your brain, this free course from freeCodeCamp might just be your best option.

As mentioned, beyond SQL this course covers relational database management systems, and specifically uses MySQL to explore these concepts. How in-demand are relational databases, and the MySQL database system in particular? The DB-Engines Ranking ranks database management systems based on their popularity, and is updated monthly. As of this writing, 8 of the top 10 ranked databases engines are RDBMS-based, including all of the top 5. MySQL is, itself, ranked number 2 overall, so you aren't wasting your time learning this system in particular.

The DB-Engines Ranking, September 2022.

Back to the course in question. The course, developed by Mike Dane, clocks in at just over 4 hours and covers the following:

• Introduction
• What is a Database?
• Tables & Keys
• SQL Basics
• MySQL Windows Installation
• MySQL Mac Installation
• Creating Tables
• Inserting Data
• Constraints
• Update & Delete
• Basic Queries
• Company Database Intro
• Creating Company Database
• More Basic Queries
• Functions
• Wildcards
• Union
• Joins
• Nested Queries
• On Delete
• Triggers
• ER Diagrams Intro
• Designing an ER Diagram
• Converting ER Diagrams to Schemas

This course genuinely hits all of the topics needed to get up to speed on SQL and RDBMS. It will undoubtedly take more than the 4 hours of video time to go through, once you stop for playing with the SQL yourself, but for a beginner this course is definitely worth the investment.

You can find the full course for free on YouTube or below.

 
 
Matthew Mayo (@mattmayo13) is a Data Scientist and the Editor-in-Chief of KDnuggets, the seminal online Data Science and Machine Learning resource. His interests lie in natural language processing, algorithm design and optimization, unsupervised learning, neural networks, and automated approaches to machine learning. Matthew holds a Master's degree in computer science and a graduate diploma in data mining. He can be reached at editor1 at kdnuggets[dot]com.