My Favorite Free SQL Courses for Beginners

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by javinpaul

Disclosure: This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.

Hello folks, if you want to learn SQL and Database fundamentals or want to improve your SQL skills, and looking for free resources like books and online courses then you have come to the right place.

In this article, I am going to share my favorite free online courses to learn SQL from Udemy, Coursera, Pluralsight, and other popular online learning websites.

If you want to become a better programmer, or better developer then learning SQL is really important as its one of the key skills for any programmer or software developers.

This list includes free SQL course from Udemy, a popular online portal to learn popular database like Oracle, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Yes, I have tried hard to include free courses on different databases so that you can choose the right course for you.

As you already know, SQL is one of the essential and timeless skills and much more important than any fancy library or framework you are thinking to learn. If you ask me which two skills every programmer should have, I would say SQL and UNIX; these two have survived for a long time and will survive for many coming decades.

SQL is also exciting; once you get the hang of it, you would love to write queries and analyze your queries' performance.

Even though SQL is so important and many programmers realize this, I have found that many more programmers just don't spend much time improving their SQL skills. They think that knowing just SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements is enough, which is not correct.

Even though SQL is not as vast as C++ or Java, there are still many things to learn like indexing, choosing the right index, writing a correct query that performs better, and there are always many database-specific nuisances.

Things that may work in one data like Oracle it's not guaranteed to work on another database, especially if you are using a database-specific feature and not limited to SQL ANSI standard.

Anyway, you don't need to worry; if you have made a goal to learn SQL or improve your SQL skill, you will definitely spend some time learning more about SQL and the database you are currently working on.

You can take help from these courses, books, and several tutorials I have shared in this blog to fill the gaps in your understanding. Btw, I also recommend everyone to join a comprehensive SQL beginner course for structured learning.

8 Best Free Online Courses to Learn SQL in 2021

These courses have been made free by their instructor for promotional and education reasons, but you better check the price before joining the course.

Sometimes, Instructors convert their free course to the paid course once they reach their promotional target, and you may need to pay to access the material available for free earlier.

That's why I join the course when they are free and use it when I get some time to spend. Once you join, the course will be free for you. Without any further ado, here is my list of some of the best yet free courses to learn SQL and Database from scratch:

1. Introduction to Databases and SQL Querying

This is an introductory course on Databases and SQL Querying. There are no pre-requisites for this course. If you are looking to get acquainted with the concept of Databases and Queries for maybe your next interview as an analyst, this is the right course for you.

All you need is a windows machine, and we will walk through it step by step, right from setting up your environment to creating your first table to writing your first SQL query.

This course is structured in a way that you can follow along with me. At the end of this course, you should be comfortable writing simple queries, including queries related to Dates, String manipulation, Aggregation, etc.

This is an ideal course for SQL beginners with absolutely no experience in the database. You will not only learn basic SQL Syntax but also learn essential concepts of databases. No Prior Programming experience is required. This course is probably not for you if you're looking to learn more advanced and complex queries.

*2. *SQL Crash Course: PostgreSQL for Beginners

This is another free online course to learn SQL basics, but with PostgreSQL, another leading relational database. This free Udemy SQL course is also aimed at Beginners to Intermediate levels. It covers all the bases for you to get up to speed with writing SQL before you progress on to more advanced SQL for transforming and analyzing data.

It will explain everything step by step and in detail to get to know SQL very well. The course uses PostgreSQL, which you can download for free from the PostgreSQL website.

Here are key things you will learn in this free SQL course:

1. Basic SQL commands
2. Become proficient in SQL queries like SELECT, CREATE, and ALTER
3. Solid understanding of SQL

After completing this course, you should understand write join queries involving multiple tables, write aggregation-based queries using group by and having a clause, and learn how to do backups and restores. You will also learn more advanced SQL query techniques for data analysis and discovery.

3. Advanced Databases and SQL Querying

This course is an advanced T-SQL Querying course. The course expects students to know basic database concepts and are comfortable writing basic T-SQL queries like SELECT, JOINs, etc.

Students are expected to have taken my previous course (Introduction to Databases and Querying). This course covers advanced concepts like Views, Triggers, Dynamic Queries, etc.

The T-SQL Scripts for all demos are uploaded. The course is about 2+hours and has assignments at the end of each concept.

If you looking for your next database job or trying to improve your existing database knowledge and apply it to your projects, this is the course for you.

*4. *Microsoft SQL Server - An Introduction

This is another awesome free database course to learn about Microsoft SQL Server from Udemy. This free course is 2.5 hours long and will teach you MSSQL or T-SQL from group up.

Here are the key things you will learn in this free Udemy SQL course:

1. How to download and install SQL Server Express on your computer - for free
2. How to log in and create a database.
3. How to create a table and insert data
4. How to retrieve the data contained in your table.
5. Learn about the SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, and ORDER BY clauses.

In short, a nice course to learn SQL with Microsoft SQL Server. If you happen to use this database, this is just the perfect course, and it's free.

5. Oracle SQL - A Complete Introduction

In this course, you will learn how to write basic SQL statements to view data, insert data, update existing data, and delete data in a database.

It's perfect for beginners or first-timers who have no idea about databases or SQL and want to learn these skills using Oracle database.

6. SQL in 4 hours [FreeCodeCamp]

This is another excellent free course to learn SQL online. This course is available on FreeCodeCamp's YouTube channel. In this course, Mike Dane will teach you database management basics and SQL using the MySQL RDBMS.

The course is designed for beginners to SQL and database management systems, and will introduce common database management topics.

Throughout the course you will learn different SQL topics including schema design, basic C.R.U.D operations, aggregation, nested queries, joins, keys and much more. I really loved the triggers and ER diagrams sections, they are great.

Here is full list of topics covered in this free SQL course:
⭐️ Contents ⭐
⌨️ (0:00) Introduction
⌨️ (2:36) What is a Database?
⌨️ (23:10) Tables & Keys
⌨️ (43:31) SQL Basics
⌨️ (52:26) MySQL Windows Installation
⌨️ (1:01:59) MySQL Mac Installation
⌨️ (1:15:49) Creating Tables
⌨️ (1:31:05) Inserting Data
⌨️ (1:38:17) Constraints
⌨️ (1:48:11) Update & Delete
⌨️ (1:56:11) Basic Queries
⌨️ (2:08:37) Company Database Intro
⌨️ (2:14:05) Creating Company Database
⌨️ (2:30:27 ) More Basic Queries
⌨️ (2:26:24) Functions
⌨️ (2:45:13) Wildcards
⌨️ (2:53:53) Union
⌨️ (3:01:36) Joins
⌨️ (3:11:49) Nested Queries
⌨️ (3:21:52) On Delete
⌨️ (3:30:05) Triggers
⌨️ (3:42:12) ER Diagrams Intro
⌨️ (3:55:53) Designing an ER Diagram
⌨️ (4:08:34) Converting ER Diagrams to Schemas

And here is the link to watch this SQL course for free

*6. *Database Design and Management

This is another great free course from Udemy to learn Database design and modeling. In this free online course, you will learn relational database design with practical concepts and examples. This series works with any database system!

Here are the key skills you will learn in this free database design course:

1. How to design a database with ERD
2. How to maintain database productively and effectively
3. How to use Visual Paradigm in database design
4. How to use Visual Paradigm in database management

This is an ideal course for developers who write SQL code and have at least a year of SQL experience and if you are thinking of becoming a DBA.

8. SQL for Data Science

This is another awesome course to learn SQL Fundamentals for Data Scientists. This is one of the most popular SQL course on Coursera and more than 350K people have joined this course.

It's also part of Learn SQL Basics for Data Science Specialization which is offered by UCDavis, University of California.

This course is designed for beginners and will teach you fundamentals of SQL and working with data so that you can begin analyzing it for data science purposes.

The best thing about this course is that it starts with the basics and assumes you do not have any knowledge or skills in SQL. You can also audit this course for Free on Coursera.

It will build on that foundation and gradually have you write both simple and complex queries to help you select data from tables. You'll start to work with different types of data like strings and numbers and discuss methods to filter and pare down your results.

That's all about some of the best free SQL courses to learn online for beginners. People often have free means of low quality, but these courses are excellent, high-quality courses.

We are lucky that their authors have made them available for free, and big thanks to them for sharing their hard work for free for other people's benefit.

I hope you can achieve your goal of improving your SQL skill this year, and I am sure you will thank yourself for learning SQL.

Other Useful Programming Resources you may like to explore

• Top 5 Courses to Learn Python for Beginners
• 5 Courses to Learn Microservice Development for Java Devs
• 10 DevOps Courses for Experienced Programmers
• 5 Courses to Learn Java for Beginners
• Top 5 Free Courses to Learn Blockchain for Beginners
• Top 5 Free React Courses for Web Developers
• 5 Free Courses to Learn Angular for Beginners
• 5 Machine Learning and Data Science Courses
• 5 Free Course to Learn Big Data, Hadoop, and Spark
• 10 Free Docker Courses for Developers
• My favorite free courses to learn Java
• 10 Best SQL and Database Courses for Beginners
• 5 Best Courses to learn MySQL Database in-depth

Thanks for reading this article so far. If you find these Database and SQL courses useful, please share them with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback, then please drop a note.

P. S. - If you don't mind paying a small amount for learning something as valuable as Database and SQL concepts, then I also suggest you take a look at these best SQL and Database courses on Hacker Noon, which are not free but definitely worth your time and money.

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by javinpaul