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Of the courses in this professional data science certificate I have taken, this is probably the best designed one. The labs force you to think and apply what you learnt in the video and not simply make minor modification to example codes. By the end of the course, I have internalized some of the commands. Overall, the labs were rather effective at drilling the concepts into students.

Some of the labs in the second week were rather lazily written. Instead of asking students to practice what they saw in the videos, all labs should contain actual questions that ask students to apply what they have learnt to new examples and problems, forcing them to think about what they have learnt.

The grading system is also in need of improvement. Some graders do not seem to know what they are doing. Simply resubmitting the assignment can result in a drastically improved score simply because the first grader was marking down answers that were actually correct. Perhaps there could be multiple graders assigned to any single assignment and the average score taken, or something to that effect.

Overall and excellent course. If you can pass this course you will have learned a lot about SQL and how SQL can be used in Jupiter Notebooks with Python. Highly recommend the course.

The only reason it did not get 5 stars is the honors course had issues with lab exercises in sections on Transactions and Final Graded Assessment.

The transaction Rose example had and extra update that caused it to fail and rollback. I found and fixed that.

In the final graded assessment, there were instructions that said write an if statement with the following information, however no information or links were provided. I got out and back in, however, in Firefox those instruction were not available. I did demonstrate the concepts being ask even though I did not have the specifics provided and was awarded the points to pass but I think either the learner should be told not to use Firefox or work is needed to ensure that the lab and instructions can be seen in Firefox.

Overall, worthwhile class. Enjoyed getting to work with stored procedures in the Honors modules. A couple small critiques:

Dump files to create the databases via import need to be audited in a couple of cases. DDL for chicago_public_schools has Leader_Icon set as varchar[4], throwing an error when writing a stored procedure to change the value to "Average" or other values over 4 characters.

ShoeShop-CREATE.sql from the ACID Transactions module has a stray "-" that causes the file to fail to import.

It's a bit odd the way DB2 modules are all optional up until the week 6 honors modules, where it switches and the MySQL modules are optional. Final project also seems geared toward DB2, however I have had to work exclusively with MySQL as I still can't seem to get IBM's system to approve my Cloud Account.