Top 7 ways to learn to write better and faster SQL queries?

Imagine how spider-man's life would look like if he had never find out that he can shoot webs from his wrist... Not a good starting point, isn't it?

Sometimes one can learn to write SQL queries but miss critical functionalities and important features, which can change their day-to-day life and save them significant amount of time while writing or reviewing SQL queries.

In the following article, we've reviewed and listed some of the best tutorials, hands-on exercises and books which can quickly help you get the knowledge you need to write better and faster SQL queries.

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
• Coursera - 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 Cheat sheets - cheat sheets may be useful as quick reminders on how to use the most common capabilities of SQL. One good example can be found here: https://websitesetup.org/sql-cheat-sheet/

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, self 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
  • SQL Performance Explained Everything Developers Need to Know about SQL Performance by Markus Winand
  • SQL Cookbook: Query Solutions and Techniques for Database Developers by Anthony Molinaro
  • SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming by Bill Karwin.

 

Enjoy this reading material, and we hope you’ll discover the SQL ninja hidden inside you!