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This course is a basic introduction to SQL, using SQLite. It covers the logic of databases, ER diagrams, how to select data from a table, create new variables, use aggregate functions, join tables and use date and text features. I finished the course with a basic set of SQL skills. That is the upside of this course.

The downsides are many. The lectures are dull and uninspired. The teacher is inarticulate and does a poor job of explaining the concepts. Some of the homework problems require the use of features not covered in class. Some of the instructions in the homework assignments are unclear, leaving the student wondering what is being asked of them. Some of the code used in the lectures does not work in the homework assignments, particularly the date functions. Week 4 of the course was particularly poor, and it was an endurance test to complete it. The final assignment, which is supposed to take 1 hour, took over a day, in part because the poor directions provided. On more than one question, I was not sure what the instructor was looking for.

The final downside is Coursera itself--the discussion boards are a useless mess. They are full of people begging other students to grade their assignments, with little actual discussion of the course material. If you are looking for help understanding something, look elsewhere; you will not find it in the discussion boards. Coursera needs to fix this mess.

In short, I can't understand how this course has an average rating of 4.5. I would not recommend it. There have to be better introductory SQL courses out there.

What this course does well is to embed the technical content in a larger business perspective to make people think before they code, which would ultimately prove useful in professional life.

However, the technical part – logically the most important for an SQL course – is really insufficient. The biggest pain point is that the course, unlike other courses teaching code or equivalent (e.g. C++, Excel), does not provide any exercise walkthrough. No need to mention it, in coding, exercise corrections are fundamental to help people understand the practical aspects of what they have juste learned. After one passes a quizz, one does not even get to view the right codes and an explanation – one just sees the grading and which answers were correct/false –, which is really a pain point. Having corrected exercise is a minimum one would be expecting when paying a subscription to follow such a course on Coursera. At least, the course could give external sources for exercises for each part.

Additionally, the videos themselves could sometimes be clearer and I have noticed some mistakes– small, but still confusing when one tries to replicate in exercices that come later – in the skeleton queries that are given in the videos.

All in all, what you are offered in this course unfortunately does not match the level of many other code courses available on Coursera (at least the ones I have already done).

Really bad. I'm trying to be fair here, and I understand that there are reasons the instructors made some choices that they did, however:

-You can't teach a course designed for absolute beginners and not help us install a chosen software and explain the interface. I felt SO LOST trying to download SQLite on my own, and then find out the instructor chose to teach a software with NO USER INTERFACE from the download. Why would anyone chose SQLite as the software FOR A COMPLETE BEGINNER: I have no idea. I ended up using a different course (see below) and used MySQL as my software (free, great user interface, not so intimidating for a beginner.

-I can't stress this enough: THIS IS A THEORETICAL COURSE. There is no videos in which the instructor has an SQL software open and you code along with them. IF THAT'S WHAT YOU WANT go to "Programming with Mosh." The way that this course works is, she just talks about SQL: you never are given a database from which to query / retrieve / test your programming. Like, how is this even a course if you're not at least providing some sample data to work with?

I'm really disappointed in Coursera: I've completed two specializations here already, really enjoyed each and had no desire to leave the website, but after this I'm going to be much more careful and looking at other websites like Udemy.

Why are you introducing so much theory initially for a new user who cannot contextualize the meaning of it? I'm encountering things that I do not fully understand (e.g., JOINS, subsets, handling complex queries - lesson: Creating temporary tables), when I have not even written my first query? That information is useless in this moment, and much less retained.

There's a principle in education called "competence before comprehension". I need to be able to try new things, findout what is inefficient, develop inferences and conclusions on my own. Telling someone the importance of a primary key is not helpful than showing in a database what a particular primary key is and why it was chosen. The learner can come to the conclusion on its own about why it needs to be unique, how to choose it and why it cannot be a null.

Bottom line: You cannot keep on layering new concepts without first writing a single line of query. You learn the syntax and develop from the failures. You're constantly talking about how to bake a cake, differences between a carrot cake and red velvet cake, talking about different frosting types, showing pictures of the final cake, meanwhile I have not even made a cupcake yet, forget about red velvet.

While this course does help to equip learners with basic knowledge of SQL, the overall implementation and conduction of the course materials leave a lot to be desired. First off, the videos are very dry and un-engaging, making it difficult to focus on key points within each lesson. Also, I am very surprised that there is no coding exercise after each video lesson to reinforce the topics touched on considering that this is a course for a programming language. Instead, all coding exercises are done within the graded quiz at the end of each Week course, which by the time you get to, you might have forgotten materials previously touched on.

Another point is the lack of establishing good formatting practices early on for learners (it only comes around halfway through the course and is only very superficially touched on). This is demonstrated through the course materials where I do notice inconsistencies within the coding formats presented. I think this is a very important point that a programming langugage course should have to develop good formatting behaviours and improve code readability overall.

While I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn through Coursera, this specific SQL course is greatly lacking. The delivery and teaching format is out dated, and it's pretty much what the MOOC classes were when Coursera launched a decade ago. This course isn't good for students with learning disabilities, let alone for learners with zero background in SQL. The final project goes from 0 to 100 without learners properly being able to build the skills to effectively get the final project completed with confidence.The final project is beyond the scope of what this course even prepares you for. My overall impression is that this course needs an overhaul, with teaching methods that are engaging, interesting, and suitable for learners who truly do not have ANY background in SQL or tech.

Weeks 1 - 3 contained good information and had good problem sets. Week 4 totally drops the ball. The lectures do not fully flesh out the many uses of datetimes, cases or views. The problem sets for week 4 should be much more extensive to practice these concepts. The lectures on sql for Data Science are fluff - no skills are included; and then the student is expected to perform these skills in the peer reviewed assignment. The peer review assignment has several poorly specified questions. Overall the lectures could be improved by showing the ER diagrams for the tables the lecturer is referring to rather than only showing a query. Many lectures should be reshot where the lecturer misspeaks/does not complete her thought, or where she burps while speaking.

I would not recommend this course for the following reasons.

1. The last assignment was very confusing. The link to the worksheet lands the learner in a VS code editor. This comes completely out of the blue since VS code is not introduced prior to this. It misleads you into thinking you need to use VS to complete the assignment. It is unclear where to find the yelp database. After searching on stack overflow I found the answer.

2. The music that overlay’s the speaker's voice is distracting.

3. Some of the quizzes tests you on the speaker’s opinions rather than on facts.

4. I didn’t feel some of the concepts where explained well.

5. Having previously finished the Andrews Ng course, which was very well put together, I felt that this SQL course was sloppy.

I am providing a two-star review for the final project due to the grading process that involves peer evaluation. While I understand the importance of obtaining approval and receiving the certificate, I have concerns regarding the time it takes for projects to be reviewed by peers. As someone who invested significant hours into this course, I have been actively grading other students' projects since I have ample time available. However, I have noticed that some projects from as far back as 2020 remain ungraded. It appears that the current system relies on peer submissions for timely evaluations, which could potentially result in lengthy delays rather than efficient turnaround times.

Check out the 1 star reviews, i agree with most that's said there. I still learned a lot in that course though mostly from Stackoverflow trying to answer the assignments. Problems are: the final course assignment is a mess to do and to correct, many questions are ambiguous and this class doesn't prepare for it. More than half the peers i reviewed were plagiarizing. This really shows the limits of Peer-Reviewing, more supervision needed. Finally the SQLite used for the course is 9 years old, as i discovered some functions were absent or not working. This course is due for a big update, on content (show outputs and better quizzes), SQLite version, and refreshed quizzes and assignments.

Not great-instructor stumbled through some parts of lectures and, while it's not a huge issue it made it a bit more difficult to follow. Quizzes seem to have been written by a different person (or in a different syntax) than the lectures making them frustrating to complete. The final project was far and away from the information given in the lectures and was really intimidating, especially without in-person help.

Basically the best thing about this course is that it's so disjointed and confusing you'll have to do a bunch of extra research to pass. Which, as my programmer friends tell me is something they do often at their job so I guess it kind of sets you up for the workplace?

Would not recommend. There's no real teaching, the instructor is just reading off of slides with little to no explanation. The slides are confusing, don't provide outputs to the codes that they're showing and many times have errors on them. The course including the quizzes forces you to do most of the work, and I mean that in a bad way. The videos are incredibly lazy and very little explanation is provided for some key points considering this is a beginner's course.

The only good thing I found was that it provided some structure to what I should study. I ended up studying mostly from tutorial websites. I would suggest you look for some other courses if you want to start SQL.

Overall this was a big comedown from the google data analytics courses. This course seemed less put together and many slides were missing examples to show you what they were teaching. The course also moved very quickly and at times was hard to grasp new topics. Slides illustrating what queries are doing would have been very helpful.

The final assignment is often ambiguous and the directions unclear. Additionally it is hard to find where the feedback is even located for you to review. On top of that you are paying for a course but then have to review other learners assignments for them and for you to pass which just seems strange overall.

While this course was very informative, I felt that it was set-up very poorly. The course structure is heavy on videos, with a few links to optional readings; from there you take 2 quizzes. The quizzes are the only point in each weekly lesson where you actual practice the coding. As a hands-on learner this was difficult for me, as I had to constantly reference and lookup previous skills. I would recommend using the Sandbox along each lesson to practice the coding, otherwise you are only coding 5 times (4 lessons, 1 final peer review project). The peer review project is messy, and should be reevaluated as the final project.

The course is very dissapointing. The examples and excericises are too basic and cover only small part of the material of the course (matrial covered on videos, but with no examples).

This means that by completing the course you DO NOT GAIN THE SKILLS you aimed for, since on this type of material practice is super important. Technically you get the Lab to practice but if you dont have any example/explanation on how to solve even slightly more advanced queries then it's useless.

The examples remain on the very basic level, so this does not achive the goal of taking the course.

[I have so far completed 50% of the course]

This was a basic SQL class. I really didn't need to learn using timestamp formats in yet another flavor of SQL. The grading rubric for the peer-reviewed assignment did not match 3 of the 4 assignments I reviewed which made it hard to grade them at all. Why was I grading assignments from 2020 anyway? The assignment questions were open to interpretation in some cases and lastly, the dataset provided for the final assignment was of such poor data quality I am not sure why a data science class would use this. It doesn't make sense to make any inferences. Data was fine for a basic SQL class, just not data science.

The lecturer is terrible. They read off of a teleprompter and the way the script is written is so unintuitive and verbose. What is the point in having a lecturer who's actually an expert on the topic, if they're just going to read a script like a robot?

The quizzes are good, but the topics covered in them are often not covered during the lectures. The lectures may go over the surface level of a topic, and show a really simple example but the quizzes are much more complex and will require you to find examples on the internet. The quizzes are the strong point in this course. The lectures are absolutely garbage.

Few suggestions for improvement:

1. provide a worksheet that summarizes all the material in a simple manner. It exists in many other sites so it shouldn't be a problem to provide this

2. In the quizzes and assignments - it would help to give a hand when the student does not understand the question or makes mistakes. to say "correct" or 'incorrect" is not enough.

3. the final exam is in no way align with the level of the classes.

and the worse thing is that in the forum it seems that a lot of students have complained but nothing has changed... therefore I would not recommend this course.

There are 3 major issues with this course: 1. the instructor appears to be reading from a teleprompter and constantly struggles with her text, making the lectures both distracting and soporific. The cheerleading ('Are you excited about joins yet?') doesn't do anything to change that. 2. Some portions of the final assignments are poorly worded and the mentors aren't active. 3. There is a huge backlog for assignment grading which is frustrating and causes the discussion threads to be polluted by students asking for others to grade their assignment.

The instructor shows queries without showing the tables that are selected from nor the end result of the query. Often it is not clear what a query does by just watching the videos. Also you are not provided with the database that the instructor is using, so you can't rerun the queries and play around with them, which is essential for learning sql.

The questions during the videos and the module quizzes are too simple compared to the course material and the topics looked at.

Although the structure of the course is well organised the assignments and videos contain lots of mistakes. I had to spent a lot of time by searching in the internet what is wrong in my code to realise that the instructor code was wrong as well and should not work (although they provide the results as it works just fine). Moreover, some questions are written not clearly and the explanations in the videos lack advanced examples while talking a lot about unnecessary things.

Course was a good overview of SQL for beginners but the quizzes and assignments were VERY POORLY DESIGNED. The questions often made little sense and often implied coding requirements that are way beyond the scope of the course. This lead to a significant amount of time being wasted in figuring out what is being asked. This seems to be a very common issue based on the forum posts. I HIGHLY recommend that the course instructors investigate and re-word the questions.

Unfortunately, the lectures did not provide engaging delivery, or insightful examples. There were unaddressed errors in the quizzes and many questions addressed topics that either reflected the subjective opinion of the instructor, or were not mentioned in the lectures at all. In those instances, external resources were required to come to a solution. This would not be a problem, if this did not affect the majority of information required to pass this course.