Best and fastest way to learn SQL

Imagine that spider-man didn’t know that he can shoot webs from his wrist… Not a good starting point, right?

Sometimes one can learn writing SQL queries but miss critical functionalities and hidden parameters which can change their day-to-day life and save tons of hours while writing or reviewing SQL queries.

Tip: Do not click here if all your SQL queries are as fast as a lightning!

In the following article, we collected some of the best tutorials and hands-on exercises which can quickly help you get on board.

Basic SQL training

• Khan Acadamy – Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization created in 2006 with a goal of creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of YouTube videos. Here is a short training with videos and self learning exercise    https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/sql/sql-basics/v/welcome-to-sql
• Courser a – Every course on Coursera is taught by top instructors from the world’s best universities and educational institutions. Courses include recorded video lectures, auto-graded and peer-reviewed assignments, and community discussion forums. When you complete a course, you’ll receive a shareable electronic Course Certificate. That’s cool!
  Here you can find different SQL courses for data scientist, excel experts, developers and business analysts:    https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=sql
• Udemy – Udemy is an online learning platform. It is aimed at professional adults. Unlike academic MOOC programs which are driven by traditional collegiate coursework, Udemy uses content from online content creators to sell for profit, which makes its content pretty good. The SQL course is not free and it costs about $10 but it’s definitely worth it: https://www.udemy.com/sqlcourse/ Code academy – Codecademy is an education company. But not one in the way you might think. They are committed to building the best learning experience inside and out.
  Their SQL course includes good hands-on exercises: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-sql
• SQL Bolt – cool website with good interactive exercise – https://sqlbolt.com/
• Lynda – Lynda.com is an American online education company offering video courses taught by industry experts in software, creative, and business skills. This course has good reviews as well: https://www.lynda.com/SQL-tutorials/Learning-SQL-Programming/548044-2.html
• Vertabelo is an online database design tool and they created some good courses, not all of them are free, but worth checking out: https://academy.vertabelo.com/#courses_list_section
• Solo learn – Sololearn offers a lot on short quizzes and can be a good way for you to test your skills – https://www.sololearn.com/Course/SQL/
• SQL Teaching – https://www.sqlteaching.com/ – a nice online training designed for kids, with good hands-on exercises

SQL Advanced training

• Khan Acadamy: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/sql/relational-queries-in-sql/a/splitting-data-into-related-tables
• Stanfourd university, sel paced courses that can give you a certificate: https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/about

Performance oriented training

• https://www.sqlite.org/queryplanner.html
• https://use-the-index-luke.com/ (by Markus Winand)

Highly Recommended Performance Related Books

• • High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication by Baron Schwartz (from VividCortex ),  Peter Zaitsev and Vadim Tkachenko (the co-founders of Percona !)
  • SQL Tuning-  Generating Optimal Execution Plans by Dan Tow from singingsql.com
  • SQL Performance Explained Everything Developers Need to Know about SQL Performance by Markus Winand (follow him on twitter – https://twitter.com/MarkusWinand or visit his cool site https://winand.at/ )
  • SQL Cookbook: Query Solutions and Techniques for Database Developers by Anthony Molinaro
  • SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming by the Bill Karwin from the bay area.

Good learning, and we hope you’ll discover the SQL ninja inside you!