SQL programming, anyone use it?

Factual Questions
1

I’m looking to practice my skills in SQL.
I’m in need of some sites where I can practice queries, to a database.

I’ve found a couple sites already, but I’m looking for more…

Can anybody link me to some other ones please?
Here are the ones I already have found.
*****(http://www.sql-ex.ru/)
*****(http://sqlzoo.net/)

2

Why don’t you just download MySQL (or similar) and setup a database locally? Surely that would be easier than running queries against some random database somewhere that anybody can mess with.

3

SQL Express is a free version of SQL Server you can set up locally on your machine.

4

SQLite is a fairly simple, but effective (with the right configuration) SQL implementation that has implementations/bindings for many programming languages.

If you’re only interested in SQL and don’t care about other programming languages (and I have no idea why you would be), you probably don’t care about it. If you want to try an idiosyncratic take on the SQL standard that’s easy to use (and is also used in some embedded systems like HTML5 and Android), I suggest you take a look at SQLite.

5

XAMPP is trivially easy to install on Windows and then you get to work with MySQL database using the very nice phpMyAdmin browser interface. Interface for SQL Server Express is not that convenient, but if you want to learn specifically the SQL Server dialect of SQL then of course practice with that.

6

The factual answer is that all big companies use it and it is about the most marketable and transferable skill you can have bar none. You can make it unto the upper middle class by doing nothing more than being really good at SQL and it won’t go away unlike other programming languages do. It isn’t really about SQL syntax though. It is about basic database skills of which SQL is just a way to tell it what you want to do no matter how trivial or complicated kind of like a math problem.

That said, you can take SQL as far as you want. It simple simple for anyone to do queries like 'SELECT name FROM PETS where type = ‘DOG’;" It is a completely different matter to be called at 3 am to figure out why there is a worldwide outage on a corporate database and know instantly how it can be fixed.

I am an Oracle expert and can find a job easily even in this job market based on that alone but I started out much smaller 13 years ago. I would recommend MS Access as a start if you have a copy. It won’t teach you everything at once but it will teach you concepts and it is usually graphical. The concepts are the most important thing. You can download MYSQL or even Oracle for free to learn on (the latter cost millions of dollars for many paid customers but you can use it at home if you are dedicated).

I would start with MS Access if you have a copy but you have to switch to the text query builder to understand what it is doing to really understand what is going on. Good Oracle and MS SQLServer DBA’s make in the six figures but that is with experience for larger companies and there is so much to know that no single person knows it all. If you want a good SQL primer, the O’Reilly series of books are really good and they sell those at most major bookstores. They have many volumes on SQL alone but getting started is fairly easy.

7

Another Oracle guy here, SQL is everywhere, but it’s not an end in itself. Want to tell us what are you learning SQL for?

8

Thanks Shagnasty for the information. I’ve used Oracle, Informatica, Teradata, Crystal Reports, and a few other programs. I’m stilling learning so much, since I’m new to the SQL realm.

I’m working for a company that deals with using software programs, where you can’t avoid using SQL somewhere along the line.

I really enjoy the Teradata side of things, I do need to learn more of how the ELT process goes and the structure of the data-warehouses.

The reason I would like to use other database systems. Is that I don’t want to run queries against my own database, more or less have some real life queries to run and questions to go against. I feel that makes me learn more…

Any more information you can provide would be great!

9

http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_tryit.asp

10

Don’t you have MS Office? If so, worth with the Northwind database in Access (installed by default, I think).