Recommend an SQL course

[GrumpyPaul]

So it turns out I have been a good boy - according to my mid year performance review.

As a reward I get to spend some money on training. The boss suggested maybe do an SQL course - which I kind of like idea of too.

I have about $2k to spend if the course is right.

Does anyone know of a good Melbourne based provider of SQL training?

 

[bum]

What platform?

 

[GrumpyPaul]

Not too sure - to be honest.

My team are "end users" of the reports etc that will be extracted using SQL.

It was suggested that with some SQL training i could extract the reports for our department directly rather than have to submit a request to another area to do it for us. Kind of a cutting out the middle man concept - but also to allow us to do adhoc queries from time to time that we would normally have to submit a request and business case blah blah blah....whereas there might be occasions if we had the skills ourself we could just get in an do it.

So to cut a long story short - at this stage I dont know what I dont know....yet.

The boss said look into....

 

[bum]

Do you know if you're running Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle DB, other? The syntax for each has a few important differences if you're looking at anything but the most simple queries and is important to do a course for the right platform. SQL ain't SQL, is what I'm saying. If that makes any sense.

SWMBO did a Transact-SQL course a few months ago and liked it. I can find out where she did it if you guys are on SQL Server.

 

[Parks]

There is a fair bit involved in getting up to speed.

What's your current level of literacy with regard to databases and programming in general?

I would hope your IT guys will have a replicated / read only server which will get used solely for reports as it's very easy to cripple a production server should you have sufficient data.

 

[GrumpyPaul]

mmm - seems like I need to find out a bit more about our systems first.

With regards to my "literacy level" i would say beginner at best.

I am pretty handy with excel and a bit of VB stuff - so people tend to think "oh you can find out about this SQL stuff becausee your good with a spreadsheet"

I will be the first to admit the logic behind the above is a bit dumb - but at the same time Iam more than happy to take advantage of the training to expand my own knowledge and learn SQL.

 

[brad81]

Slightly off topic, but does your business use crystal reports? You could execute some pretty impressive reports with that.

It's a very handy skill to have, I'm seeing stacks of advertisements wanting reporting skills.

 

[DJR]

Honestly go buy a SQL book and spend a little time seeing if it's for you. No point dropping 2K on a course you might not get much out of. SQL server can be had in a developer/free edition and is really easy to install, you can even put the analysis services data warehousing etc. If you do go down that path you can then move into reporting and data warehousing setup.

And if I was doing loads of reports I would probably just build a data warehouse as it's easier to create reports against than having to do very complicated SQL (joins, sub selects, stored procedures etc)

If you do go down the path though, SQL is probably good as a start in either T-SQL (MS), Oracle SQL or even MySQL/Postgres, I might go down a path with something like database design or data modelling, or into data warehousing/reporting setup as both of those streams should always have plenty of demand for skilled people. Particularly if you can communicate well to people from the biz side and work out what they want (which usually involves showing them what you think they want so they can complain about it which is actually better than getting them to explain what they want, great times in IT!)

Also I might add... if you are good with excel that should be OK for SQL but it's a different kind of thing... e.g. do you use pivot tables and all the lookup functions in excel, if you understand how those work then database programming should be easy enough to pick up

 

[pk.sax]

I don't know what an SQL course would look like!

Look up w3schools (website) SQL sections.

Lots of syntax help there. If your work already has SQL databases set up and tools to query reports set up, all you'd need is to start playing and you 'should' learn your way around. If it is saveable, save the 2k for a more advanced course once you are familiar with the normal stuff, again no idea what that would be but basic SQL, differences in syntax between flavours and querying doesn't really need a course as such. More like a friendly SQL guru at work who'd answer your questions when you are stuck.

 

[sp0rk]

Like other's have suggested, buy a decent book and spend some time faffing about writing basic queries and playing about
If you'll be using Oracle (my flavour of choice), Get Application Express and make yourself an application, build up some reporting pages and tool with the SQL behind that
I used the w3schools site and a few books we had at work, combined with bugging the other developers at work and I'm finally starting to get handy with SQL about a year and a half after starting to learn it