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Learner Reviews & Feedback for SQL for Data Science by University of California, Davis

4.6
stars
15,994 ratings

About the Course

As data collection has increased exponentially, so has the need for people skilled at using and interacting with data; to be able to think critically, and provide insights to make better decisions and optimize their businesses. This is a data scientist, “part mathematician, part computer scientist, and part trend spotter” (SAS Institute, Inc.). According to Glassdoor, being a data scientist is the best job in America; with a median base salary of $110,000 and thousands of job openings at a time. The skills necessary to be a good data scientist include being able to retrieve and work with data, and to do that you need to be well versed in SQL, the standard language for communicating with database systems. This course is designed to give you a primer in the fundamentals of SQL and working with data so that you can begin analyzing it for data science purposes. You will begin to ask the right questions and come up with good answers to deliver valuable insights for your organization. This course starts with the basics and assumes you do not have any knowledge or skills in SQL. It will build on that foundation and gradually have you write both simple and complex queries to help you select data from tables. You'll start to work with different types of data like strings and numbers and discuss methods to filter and pare down your results. You will create new tables and be able to move data into them. You will learn common operators and how to combine the data. You will use case statements and concepts like data governance and profiling. You will discuss topics on data, and practice using real-world programming assignments. You will interpret the structure, meaning, and relationships in source data and use SQL as a professional to shape your data for targeted analysis purposes. Although we do not have any specific prerequisites or software requirements to take this course, a simple text editor is recommended for the final project. So what are you waiting for? This is your first step in landing a job in the best occupation in the US and soon the world!...

Top reviews

GC

Dec 29, 2022

Great course! A solid way to introduce a learner to programming in SQL!! Sadie is an amazing online instructor! Thank you to Sadie and UC Davis for offering this course through the Coursera platform!!

JG

Aug 22, 2021

I thought this course was great! Great introduction to Relational Databases and SQLite. Highly reccomend for anyone new to SQL, Databases, or someone looking to get started with a data science career.

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2976 - 3000 of 4,169 Reviews for SQL for Data Science

By Chris U

Mar 10, 2022

Generally was good. I want to stress on explaining more on converting ER diagrams to data tables, foreign vs primary keys (and their differences) , and date/times. Great emphasis on the last part because during the lesson, the instructor seemingly found 'AGE' without any real explanation. I did the same thing in the quizes and got a strange output. Please, please, please fix that.

The lesson on VIEWS were not so useful due to the limitations of SQLite so other programs like MySQL can teach better for general use. It would have been nice to practice with the VIEWS statement.

By Kathy Z

Jul 27, 2020

Excellent content if you're new to SQL! The videos were a little slower paced than I liked but I simply reset the streaming pace to 1.25 times faster and that did the job. I wish there were some more frequent practice questions. I do appreciate that the assignments and quizzes were slightly more challenging in that you couldn't just regurgitate exactly what you were told during lecture. I'm somewhat disappointed that I ended up googling a good number of concepts in order to better process them. But again, plus side, you don't need to download extra software to practice.

By Naveen J

Nov 1, 2021

Really a good course for the beginners to understand the basics of SQL and take their career ahead. Sadie was great in explaining. However, I felt (my opinion) there were much more in depth details to the course which could have been explained in the videos or classes. Like extra knowledge where links were provided in modules. Instead it could have been a recorded video with examples of coding for better understanding. There are different ways for writing codes for queries which could also have thought to us. Overall a great platform to learn and advance their skills.

By Andreina R

Mar 9, 2021

A very good starting point for those with zero experience with SQL. The layout of the program is very helpful as well as the tests. Same, I felt that the heaviest part of exercises and training are all in the very last assignment. Some questions are a not very well explained and many of the participants have to invest time in finding the answers in the forum discussions, and I think that is wrong. The course and its tests should be clear enough to complete our exercises. But overall, I recommend this course to anyone that would like to learn the basics of SQLite.

By Yirieth M

Apr 27, 2020

The course is very well structured and gave me plenty of skills to be able to retrieve data on my own. I do have a complain, and it is that some questions throughout the exercises and in the final assignment are not very well explained and lead to confusion, it is not immediately clear what the question(s) is asking to do. Also I would have liked that during the lecture videos, the examples come along with the resulting data table. It was done in some but not all which I missed when referring back to the lectures in order to be able to do the coding exercises.

By Jared B

May 21, 2020

Overall a great course although I'm not sure how well I would have picked this up had I not had prior experience. I used this course as a refresher after having dabbled in SQL a few months back and hardly touched it until recently. This course did help reinforce concepts and better taught ones I was less familiar with. I also liked the amount of problems that were provided and the various resources. All that said, the lecture method doesn't feel the strongest for teaching the content in the depth it requires - at least for me if I were a complete newcomer.

By Caleb T

Jan 8, 2021

A good introduction to SQL. It briefly mentions creating tables, but not really how to put data in with INSERT. Though, I suppose, that's a quick search away.

The quality of the videos and content is mostly fine, but could do with showing the results of queries more often. There are some editing mistakes here and there, but it's nothing big. However, one of the videos mentioned an 'ETL process' which I do not believe was mentioned before in the course.

One of the questions in the last quiz also needs updating, since the correct answer has changed.

By Kerry G

Dec 22, 2020

I very much appreciated the instructor's enthusiasm, immense knowledge of the topics and ability to bring real world examples to the presentations.This course is well organized, introduces many topics in a logical sequence and is fairly interactive. Students (even a more advanced beginner like me) could benefit from much more practice throughout the modules. I found the final exam to be very daunting with so little practice beforehand. The discussion forums could be better designed and managed to make them (more) useful to the student community.

By Vibhu G

Aug 24, 2022

If you're going to work on SQL for the first time in your life, then I would suggest you to first go for this course on Udemy The Ultimate MySQL Bootcamp: Go from SQL Beginner to ExpertOpens in a new tab. This will make you comfortable with SQL but this course has not that much depth. Now once you've completed that course on Udemy, then come back to this course. Now you'll have clarity of evrything and plus you'll be able to get the depth which is in this course. And remember to take the 2nd course also because that is even better than this one and is super fun.

By James K

Feb 6, 2024

Overall the course was not bad. It covered the basics and was mostly understandable. Only thing I would suggest is more real time examples during lectures. I badly struggled during the subqueries and joins lectures. The query statements were displayed, but Sadie verbally told us what was going on. It would have been nice to see 2 tables as a before view and a returned table after the queries were executed. Then we could see what she was saying in action. Visually it was hard to follow and I ended up going to Youtube for more explanation.

By Daniel B

Mar 9, 2018

The course is informative, but there should be more hands-on type questions mid-video. Internalizing information would be much more efficient if there was more than just seeing results of queries and answering poorly worded questions. The final assignment can be one of great effort or minimal effort depending on the individuals interest in trying out complex queries that are out of their comfort zone, but both sides of the coin end up with the same certificate in hand. So, just like most courses in life, you get only what you put into it.

By Deleted A

Jan 3, 2021

The content of this course is from an introduction perspective very good. Not only focussing on the technical sides of SQL but also in how to perform the learned experiences in practice. The coding assignments and especially the peer-reviewed assignments are on the right introductory level.

A small area of improvement within this course would be the way of how the information is presented. It is very clear that the information is read from an autocue and sometimes this feels annoying. Also, the theoretical quizes are often too easy.

By John M D

Dec 10, 2019

I thoroughly enjoyed this course as my first experience in Coursera. The lectures were presented in a well paced manner and the information was sufficiently broken down. However, the first few weeks suffered from insufficient assignments to reinforce the concepts learned. As a result, the final assignment was well beyond the normal intensity of the course and I felt unprepared. The final assignment appears to be developed by someone other than the core instructor and has a completely different understanding of the course scope.

By Matt M

Dec 2, 2022

Definitely a challenging course as someone who is new to SQL.. The videos are good, but could explain a bit more with better examples to help with the coding modules. Do not rely on only the information from the course only, you will have to use other sources such as youtube, and sql books. Athough overall I am very happy to have completed this course and the knowledge I have acquired. It will be frustrating at times, but don't give up. Take a break if you need, and then come back and review. Not easy but well worth it!

By Eric M

Feb 19, 2019

Overall I think the course was pretty good. I think a lot of sections could have used more examples, especially of queries that combined several different types of clauses. There were also too many "choose the better answer" type questions in the weekly quizzes with more than one correct answer. Finally, the wording on many of the final assignment questions was terribly unclear. There are dozens of posts and questions about these on the forums. Ironing out these deficiencies would really help improve the overall course.

By David L L R

Aug 23, 2020

The course addresses all the topics necessary to start using SQL for profiling and analyzing data. To improve: 1). For various topics, there weren't enough examples and forth these themes could be confusing 2). It's too much visible that the teacher is reading a teleprompter and there were occasions where the sentences are not well connected, and at least for non-english speakers, this could be annoying and confusing. The assignments are well designed, and in these exercises is when you really start to learn.

By Guan-Yuan W

May 23, 2020

This course has improved my SQL skills and let me further my knowledge of Database Management System. Also, there are some coding assignments helping cultivate my hands-on SQL coding skills, especially for data science.

However, some of the lecture videos felt disconnected from the coursework, honestly. The lecturer just read out verbatim, showing too few examples and too few coding tests. Moreover, the assignments were too few so I supposed I should have to take another course so as to get massive progress.

By James D

Feb 14, 2024

The instructor is great and explains everything clearly. I enjoyed taking this class and look forward to the rest of this specialization. The only reason I am taking off a star is because the last week did not have any practice like the previous week, some of the questions weren't exactly clear on the final and I really did not enjoy the peer review. I am not sure if it is something that coursera requires, but that could have been mostly done like the other assignments. I overall recommend this course.

By Eric J

Nov 12, 2020

This course would be better if there were written exercises during or after important topics. Complex topics in the later modules were skimmed over with simple examples. The last quiz or two, including the peer review project had more complex code requirements where students would have benefited from writing queries throughout the modules. Overall, it was a good course but it could have been better. I'm not a fan of Coursera peer-reviewed projects as you or your peers may not be subject matter experts.

By Shaocheng P

Jun 10, 2018

It's better if someone can give learners some advice on their project. It's really hard to finish a complete project by the learners themselves. What's more, as a starters, everyone knows a little, only some basic knowledges, so we don't know how we did on our project. It's better that someone who is more professional on this course, like TA or someone who can give us some advice on our project and it could be better if we can have some sample answers after we finally finished the complete course.

By anugrah v

Dec 18, 2020

The course touches on a lot of concepts and techniques of SQL which will come in handy for business and knowledge purposes.

What I believe could be improved is that most of the knowledge was theoretical. The questions in the assignments could be aligned with what is taught. In short, if the videos focused more on how to do things, how to align our knowledge in extracting the required data, what steps we could use, instead of simply providing a standard formula, then it would have been better

By Ricardo Z

Jun 1, 2022

I generally liked the course, but there are 2 things for which it did not get 5 stars

1) The second part of the peer-reviewed assignment wasn't clear. This can be confirmed by the number of queries in the forum trying to make sense to what is being asked to do.

2) I strongly disagree with being forced to review 4 peer reviews to be able to complete the course. I understand the value of peer review, and I'm happy to do my part, but there should not be an obligation of reviewing more than 2.

By Zakaria A

May 10, 2023

Great fundamental learning on SQL (complimenting SQLite) and common operations including:

- Linking tables via common denominator (column names)

- Case statements

- Calculation operations

- Filtering Data tables

- Understanding data types and importance in different DBMS

Could improve:

- writing code learning begins to fall off when we get to Joins and case statements. the writing of code becomes blurry in understanding as it isn't clearly expressed in video on what each line of code represents.

By Sarah B S

Jun 8, 2018

Hi, I just started this course, and so far it's great, but in Data Models, Part 1:Thinking About Your Data, I think there is a typo in the last question for this module. One of the answer choices is "A translation system for used to communicate with Data Scientists" You probably meant to write "A translation system used to communication with Data Scientists" (leaving out "for") Just figured you might want to know so you can change it before more people sign up for the course. All the best!

By Ascen P

Feb 22, 2022

I believe that you learn a lot with the course and that it is very well subtitled, but there is a lack of information and technical help, since as a personal experience, the online laboratory did not work for me and I had to look for life to see the databases, I think that There should be for the final project a notebook like in the exercises where I can run and resume the databases. In general, I am very happy and I have learned a lot, despite the problem that I have had. I recommend it.