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SQL Fundamentals for Data: A hands-on course for beginners

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Beginner content levelBeginner

Join Thomas Nield for a hands-on introduction to core database and SQL fundamentals—concepts that are critical in today’s business and technology landscape. Businesses are gathering data at exponential rates, and there’s an equally growing demand for people who know how to access it meaningfully. Through a combination of lecture and exercises—and Thomas’s pragmatic approach to teaching—you’ll gain proficiency with SQL fundamentals and database design. Using the simplicity and power of SQLite, you can practice designing and working with databases at home without a database server environment.

Whether you’re a project manager, IT professional, business analyst, programmer, engineer, or simply a person with basic computing skills and an interest in data, you’ll make the leap to data proficiency with this course.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

By the end of this live, hands-on, online course, you’ll understand:

  • Basic data analysis and writing tasks using SQL
  • Principles for creating resilient database designs
  • The data technology landscape and the role of relational databases versus NoSQL databases

And you’ll be able to:

  • Quickly apply knowledge to most relational database platforms (Oracle, MySQL, etc)
  • Aggregate and join data to get a more complete picture
  • Read, write, and transform data in tables
  • Execute basic data analysis to create aggregations and establish relationships

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a business analyst who has done some data analysis and now needs to access larger datasets and make sense of them
  • You’re a data science professional who wants to tap into data sources directly rather than rely on text files.
  • You’re an IT professional who wants to get involved in accessing and managing data, and understand core principles of database design
  • You’re an engineer who wants to collect data and integrate it into your systems, products, or projects
  • You’re a programmer who needs to work with and build solutions around data
  • You’re a project manager who needs to manage a team of data analysts and engineers, so you can fully understand the feasibility of projects as well as quality control

Prerequisites

  • Experience with basic data analysis using Excel or other spreadsheet tools will be helpful.

Course setup

  • Download class resources from GitHub
  • Download and launch SQLite client preferably SQLiteStudio, or just use SQLiteOnline.com

Recommended follow-up

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Introduction (10 minutes)

  • What is SQL?
  • Database basics
  • Choosing a SQL Platform
  • Setting up SQLite

Selecting and Filtering (40 minutes)

  • Using SELECT to retrieve data
  • Transforming data with SELECT
  • Data types
  • Filtering data with WHERE
  • EXERCISE LAB #1 - Retrieving and transforming records

BREAK: 10 minutes

Grouping and Sorting (50 minutes)

  • Aggregate Functions
  • Breaking up with GROUP BY
  • Sorting with ORDER BY
  • EXERCISE LAB #2 - Group and sort records

BREAK: 10 minutes

Nulls, Case Expressions, and Coalesce (50 minutes)

  • CASE Expressions
  • Handling NULL values
  • Using Coalesce
  • The NULL trick
  • EXERCISE LAB #3 - Weather report

BREAK: 10 minutes

Joining Tables (50 minutes)

  • Understanding table relationships
  • Stitching tables with INNER JOIN
  • Including unmatched records with LEFT JOIN
  • Joining and aggregating multiple tables
  • EXERCISE LAB #4 - Total revenues by product

BREAK: 10 minutes

Subqueries and Common Table Expressions (30 minutes)

  • The subquery zoo
  • Derived tables and common table expressions
  • Cool tricks with recursive patterns
  • EXERCISE LAB #5 - Customers with no orders

Creating and writing data (25 minutes)

  • Planning and creating tables
  • Inserting, updating, and deleting records
  • Hitting the “rewind” button with transactions

Closing + Final Q&A (5 minutes)

Your Instructor

  • Thomas Nield

    Thomas Nield is the founder of Nield Consulting Group and an instructor at University of Southern California, where he teaches AI System Safety, developing systematic approaches for identifying AI-related hazards in aviation and ground vehicles. He's authored three books, including Essential Math for Data Science and Getting Started with SQL (both for O'Reilly). He enjoys making technical content relatable and relevant to those unfamiliar or intimidated by it. Thomas teaches classes on data analysis, machine learning, mathematical optimization, and practical artificial intelligence. He’s also the founder and inventor of Yawman Flight, a company that develops universal handheld flight controls for flight simulation and unmanned aerial vehicles.

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Skills covered

  • SQL
  • NoSQL Databases
  • MySQL
  • SQLite