If you are located outside USA or Canada, don't take this course.

Because IBM cloud DB2 will not give you free account to do the lab exercises. Otherwise you have to pay 202$ to get an account.

I didn't continued the course due to this issue.

This course is more about IBM roping you into using a bloated cloud ecosystem, than it is about teaching you SQL. You will only learn DB2 stuff, and only through their cloud dashboard. This entire specialization is disappointing, but if you've made it this far, masochism may carry you through it.

The course teaches SQL quite well. But it doesn't teach and make practice about the connection to a database and use of sql magic. Hence, its very frustrating to understand the significance of '%sql' in a Final Assignment review. I think a lot of students are facing the same problem.

Hence, it feels like- Final assignment is to check whether we can connect to the database, rather than checking our subject knowledge on SQL.

[Reviewing the entire specialization but points are applicable for each course]

I signed up for the IBM Data Science specialization and I was genuinely excited to start it for some 4-5 weeks (I had a GCP exam coming up). I eventually started the specialization beginning of August `20 and started making my way though it and I was amazed … amazed of how much a pile of bullshit this specialization is. I made it though the first 4 courses and at the end of the SQL for data science I couldn’t take it anymore. Here’s why:

1. First and foremost, the entire specialization (all 4 courses I have taken at least) were full of typos and broken URLs which a lot of other students confirm as well. This does not speak professionalism to me but whatever, lets move on.

2. The in-video quizzes and following tests are simply ridiculous … you are expected to have memorized content word by word rather than understand thing for your own and be able to explain them. Some of the question were so far away from tech courses it is not even funny.

3. The final assignments are a total joke. We are asked to review each other which IMHO is a terrible idea since we are all just starting up. Nothing stops you from giving top marks to a bad assignments and vice versa.

4. We eventually got to the more techy part and even got code snippets and jupyter notebooks to look through but they were still bad. There was no proper order in which information was presented i.e. you would read python and seaborn code in the SQL course’s tasks even though python and matplotlib/seaborn are discussed in the following courses.

5. And my final and biggest problem with this whole specialization is that it all feel like an extended advertisement of this piece-of-dodo tech inbred excuse-of-a-software called IBM cloud. There are constants up-sells here and there how almighty IBM is and how great their cloud and IBM Watson Studio are … they are not. I had to spend 2+ hours fixing problems with jupyter notebooks and their cloud just to complete my assignments which both took me 30ish minutes. They mention open source and even though there are open source equivalents to jupyter they insist using IBM cloud. I kept having the feeling they are more focused on promoting IBM products than actually bringing quality content.

6. Now after finishing the SQL course there was a 1min survey which I gladly filled in basically letting them know their specialization if terrible and is doing more harm than good in my opinion. I even sent them a quick challenge because I do not think IBM maintains this course at all or even reads the reviews. You can see my challenge to IBM here: https://bit.ly/3geOyfb

I was very saddened by the quality of the specialization and the content and was wondering whether I should even try and finish the remaining courses but after reading some reviews on the remaining courses I figured out it was just more of the same. If you are in the same boat I would recommend the kaggle micro-courses which I will focus on starting next week.

In conclusion, I got this whole specialization for free via financial aid and I have to say even though I did not pay a dime I feel I need to be compensated by IBM and refunded real money for torturing myself with their courses.

I would've given a five-star rating gladly, if it weren't for the terrible user experience of IBM DB2 Console, which wasted 4 hours of my time trying to load three small csv files into database tables.

Apart from this "blocker bug", the course is well-organized and worth the price.

Horrible experience. The course is not updated. The ibm cloud function doesnt work at all. There are hardly any videos. Most of the content is just theory which you can read from anywhere. Dont waste your money.

Only one star and I think it does not deserve it. On week 3 the assignment ask you to establish a connection with database and because It gives me an error for more than 3 weeks, I decided to use Forums. After a couple of dozen messages requesting for help, I received only 2 answers from the professor:

First: "Go to week 3"

Second: " Idon't see any attachment"

I have sent so many screenshots that it is ridiculous. So If you find yourself unable to connect to the database and it gives you a constant error; my suggestion is PRAY!. Please, do not cry like me in desperation after a month. Just PRAY. I think it could work... someday

I can't open Db2 console on the IBM cloud, it only showed 502 Bad Gateway. It cost me more time on finding another way to finish the homework.

No live examples, no tutorial on how to navigate Db2 cloud. Maybe I was expecting too much; disappointed.

The IBM cloud "service" leaves much to be desired. Multiple times I've experienced outages while I was in the middle of lab assignments. It's a paid course where they give you "free" credits to do the course work in their cloud "service." But the credits are inadequate for the labs and they constantly ask for your credit card to buy more "service." While the class is okay I wouldn't recommend it to anyone because of the poor IBM cloud support.

Although the material was clear and concise, working with IBM Db2 Cloud was a headache due to its unresponsiveness

Basic SQL, course needs to be updated to reflect changes to IBM cloud (or better yet, don't use IBM cloud). You can find better courses on SQL on Coursera/other MOOC sites.

Amazing course for beginners! The entire course is well structured and has good hands-on assignments. SQL is extremely essential for Database management and fun learning so please do try this one out!

The lessons were short and easy to follow, providing all the basics as well as a few more advanced topics, to get student quickly up-to-speed on databases and SQL and their application in D/S realm.

Lot of errors and lack of guidance

Practice lab assignments were excellent in reinforcing my learning, they were just the right kind of challenging. This course has been the best one in the Data Science Professional series by far.

The information is made available, but it is just purely death by powerpoint with a scripted voiceover. There is zero intimate tutoring. This applies to all of the IBM Data Science professional certificate.

My advice on how to improve this course is to take a look at courses such as those in the Python for Everybody specialisation with Dr Charles "Chuck" Severance. When he teaches there are powerpoints, but he is intimately explaining what is happening, with the camera switching between him and his powerpoint which he is actively annotating and explaining. That is a much better teaching resource. With the IBM courses, not once have I even seen an image of the tutors or had any detailed explanation or evaluation from a human - it is purely a script describing a powerpoint slide throwing in as many meaningless business-speech words as possible, almost an advertisement for IBM services which I have the luxury of paying for.

The information is there and that is why I have not rated this as low as possible (there really are some dodgy courses out there!), and I will complete the professional certificate I paid for, but to me, this style of teaching is very impersonal and you really do feel like just a cash-cow for the company rather than a valued learner.

I'm taking it as part of the IBM Data Science professional certificate. Course is OK for an introducion to SQL, although I thought there was too much emphasis on IBM DB2 and nothing else. Would have liked them to show us how to use another API, or how to interface with open source databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL.

I have experience in programming and debugging and therefore did not find this to bother me, but the lack of guidance on how to install missing packages or troubleshoot connexions can be really frustrating for inexperienced people. It's best you do all the assignments in an IBM environment or else you will find yourself troubleshooting for hours on end.

Getting the cvs's for the final assessment was a pain because the links to them were broken! had to search through the forums to find alternative links, which points to a lack to reactivity from the guys in not updating their course material.

That being said I learnt quite a lot from this course, more python and other databases and I would have given 4 stars.

Also, one of the reviewers said you have to pay to get access to the IBM DB2 database if you're not in the US or Canada...this is not the case anymore, did it from europe no problems.

This is a great review of an important topic. If I knew how much this mattered for the advanced capstone course I would have paid more attention. As it was, I came back here frequently.

Weak representation. Full of bugs. No wonder IBM DB2 is not popular

Too much IBM oriented and specific.

This course is the lowest quality course of coursera. Credentials in final assigment don't come through. The instructions are poorly written, thank god I have before hand knowledge of ibm cloud. not a single course worked as it is intended. Total rip off of my money, since you can't check final assigment before subscribing to the course.

This is definitely the best course so far on the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate! I have been very keen to learn about SQL and Relational Databases for a while and this course enabled me to achieve that objective, in a fun practical manner. I was challenged all the way through and cherished being able to spend time making mistakes and learning from those mistakes in the hands on lab environment.

10/10 course and if the author of this program ever decided to make another course extending from what was taught on this course, it's safe to say I will be the first to sign up!!

A very useful course with some very interesting datasets/Jupyter notebooks to work through/practice your skills. Offers a good balanced blend between theory and practical/practice. Very good course!

In case IBMER's fails to have DB console lite access, its difficult to complete the assessments, hence there should be other alternative to practice it.