The Complete SQL Bootcamp Course Review
This month, I’ve been enrolled on Jose Portilla’s Udemy SQL course. It’s an 8 hour self paced course, taught through the use of video lectures, and exercises. I’ve been working from home for the past couple of weeks due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and have enjoyed the routine of spending half an hour covering SQL content before our daily morning team call at 9am.
The course teaches PostgreSQL, under the acknowledgement that MySQL syntax is very similar, so is easy to transfer between. Exercises and hands-on learning were carried out in the database query tool, pgAdmin.
We began by installing PostgreSQL and pgAdmin to our machine, and downloaded and restored a database called dvdrental. This database contained multiple tables about the films held in a stores inventory, the stores customers, the actors in the films, and details of when each film was rented.
The course began by covering basic SQL syntax: becoming confident with Select statements, Where, In and Between conditions, and Ordering output. We were introduced to regular expressions in the context of the Like condition and learnt how to group by in conjunction in functions such as count, sum and average.
Next, we learnt how to join tables together: Inner, Full Outer, Left Outer, and Self Joins all straightforward to understand thanks to clear syntax and explanation. We covered simple mathematical and string functions – mostly to be pointed to the documentation, and learnt the syntax of sub queries, which I think will be a very useful time saver.
The final section of the course turned our attention from reading tables to creating them: learning to create, alter and drop databases and tables. I was reminded of various data types, and learnt how to use primary and foreign keys, together with column constraints to ensure that tables can be referenced easily. Jose demonstrated how to import data from a SQL table into Python using Psycopg2 – something I’d like to look into more as a shortcut for loading data into Jupyter.
Overall, I enjoyed the course. Jose was a clear and concise teacher, who included numerous examples to complement the necessary theory. I feel more confident querying Dunelm company databases to access the information I need for analysis. I’m going to look for other online courses to broaden my skill set.
Until next time,
Scott
