Some questions to SQL magicians around here.

[GrotesqueRogueParticipant 116]

Good evening.

I would like to ask a couple of questions those guys who worked/are working with SQL in general or Microsoft server.

At the moment I will need to work on a project that will require me to work a lot with databases (even though I am a programmer, I almost never had to work with them for 3 years). So I started looking for the books and tutorials to get a grasp on SQL, and I found plenty of them (on Lynda, Pluralsight and some books).

At the same time I am trying to follow the rule “X time of reading => 8X time of actually doing s~~~” to get the most results. The problem that I encountered is that there’s plenty of water in the books I have found.

And that is why I want to ask you a question – what books/websites/video tutorials you guys found useful for you when learning how to work with databases? Preferably the books that are more about the practical approach – not just how SELECT, GET, JOIN and etc. work.

Thanks in advance.

[Blue SkiesParticipant 15665]

here’s a couple links
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/sql/
http://www.w3schools.com/sql/
cheers

MGTOW is not a movement, it is a way of life.

[Anonymous 2]

It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve. There are a lot of php scripts that have already been written that may be a quick solution to your problem. Please explain your goal clearer and we will offer a few solutions.

[GrotesqueRogueParticipant 116]

SEEthemTURN, all in all, I need to work with a huge database of what workers did and the results of what they were doing. I am getting this info, transform it into meaningful data that I present to the users, so that they would be able to check the statistics of any individual they want to know about.

In short – analyze data (more or less done), learn how to get all the needed data with queries (I guess, SELECT, JOIN, SORTBY, etc), transform this data into something understandable to the user (some programming that has nothing to do with databases), create a database with all of transformed values and keep it updated.

[XSDBSParticipant 3598]

O’Reilly is a good source for programming languages/databases.
http://www.oreilly.com/
I have almost a dozen of their books.

[FrostyParticipant 1]

Learn by doing for sure, get a free install of MSSQL or MySQL and have your own development environment to play with, you can write queries either directly in the SQL CLI through cmd or terminal or you can use free tools, MySQL ships with an application called Workbench which allows you to write queries by hand and will give you tools to admin the database as well.

I don’t think it’s a topic that requires buying a book, use online tutorials to get you started, w3schools has some interactive tutorials and both MSSQL and MySQL are heavily documented on their respective websites. The basics you can learn quickly, for anyone that deals with tech and coding something like SQL is a breeze to pick up.

[SeedyJParticipant 29]

SQL is fairly straightforward to pick up and easy to use providing the database you are using is correctly structured (Third Normal Form, basically).

Whatever you do try to avoid outer joins in your SELECT queries. They are a nightmare to use.

There are many sites on SQL for beginners, like:

http://www.sqlcourse.com/
http://beginner-sql-tutorial.com/sql.htm

I used SQL extensively in the past as my speciality was producing report generation systems for various systems including Project Management/Billing Systems, Customer Service Systems and (to a much lesser extent) Accounting Systems.

As well as SQL you may want to read articles on Normalising Data:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_normal_form
http://www.studytonight.com/dbms/database-normalization.php

It helped me to wrap my head about successful construction of SQL queries when I was training for my first job. You may know much of that already tho.

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