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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.

I found it had the right balance of sql coding exercises with clear and illustrtive practise task. Although I personally never asked a question in the forum, the answers to existing posers aided me well. I must say the staff were empathetic and their responses in the forum generally exuded this friendly spirit, which is very important to code newbies. It's a huge bonus to learn IBM's cloud service interface alongside sql through this course and I didn't find the application interface overwhelming as some of the tech firms offering, I still found it difficult to access different resources like the sql studio and jupyter notebook on ibm cloud and the documentation there wasn't the most intuitive. I would give a five star when these resource links are made easier to identify.

This is a great course and I particularly appreciated the integration with Python/Jupyter notebooks. As in previous courses in the IBM certificate program, the labs were the highlight. They challenged students to answer questions using real data sets. Going from start to finish - from sourcing and downloading data all the way to analysis - was very helpful in mastering all of the techniques.

A couple of sections felt out of place: in my opinion, the optional database schema topics could become a separate course of their own, while the section on joins deserved more attention. The lecture slides, with the pictures of interconnected tables, were a bit hard to read and could do with an upgrade. Overall though, great pacing, with easily digestible videos. Highly recommend.

First of all I would like to thank all the instructors and all the staff for their contribution in making this course and helping out students in times of need.The course was well designed and a lot of topic they have covered in this course related to Database and SQL. However, the main issue a lot of the students including me have faced was the use of IBM cloud account and IBM skilled network labs. The skilled network was down and it is still down for maintenance purposes in the middle of the course without having any back up service in place. It was really annoying and I lost a lot of time due to this problem. For the perspective students I wish you all the best and once more to all the instructors and to all the staff thank you.