SQL Querying: Fundamentals

Organizations typically store their most critical information — the information used to manage day-to-day operations — within a database. The ability to retrieve and analyze this information is essential to the functioning of the organization. Structured Query Language (SQL) is the primary language used to accomplish such tasks. Essentially, SQL is the language you use to interact with a database.

The ability to write SQL is an essential job skill for those who need to manage large volumes of data, produce reports, mine data, or combine data from multiple sources. Even if someone else on your team creates reports for you, having a fundamental understanding of SQL querying will help you ask the right questions and know what you’re looking for in your data analysis tools.

This course not only teaches you to use SQL as tool to retrieve the information you need from databases, but it also introduces a process for effectively planning and designing a functional, efficient database. Knowing how to plan a relational database is important to the success of the databases you create. Without planning, you cannot possibly know what the database needs to do, or even what information to include in the database. Planning a database is essential and prevents the extra work of fixing data maintenance problems later on.