SQL

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,196
Hi guys,

How hard is it to gain a basic understanding of SQL? Is it difficult to grasp the ability to write and run basic SQL queries?

My programming knowledge extends only to HTML.
 
It's just as easy or as hard as any other language. Unless you're doing anything particularly complex, the basics are very easy to grasp, and is often very easy to remember because the syntax isn't that different from how you would "think" about accessing a database.

E.g. select * from table1 where name = 'Fox'

Returns all the entries (rows) from table1 where the name column contains the value 'Fox'.
 
At my last place of work one of my friends who worked there gave me a week long crash course and it really isn't too hard. By the end of the week I could quite happily run queries on the DB to generate reports that I needed. Obviously I only know the basics but you seem a smart guy and from my experience you shouldn't have a problem.

I don't know how much you know but a good start would be to get a good understanding of relational databases if you don't already. Things like tables, types of data, primary keys, etc. and how they all link together.

I also used the SQL for dummies book and it helped quite a bit as even though you can find loads of tutorials online having a book in front of you it's much easier to flip back a page or chapter to refresh something you aren't sure of.

Good luck :)
 
Basics will only take you an hour or two to learn if all you want is simple selects, joins and updates etc.

If you move in to SQLplus then it becomes far more complicated of course.
 
SQLPlus is a proprietary language/scripting syntax, same as PL/SQL, T/SQL, etc. :) I wouldn't associate them directly with SQL.
 
If you're looking to do development then you'll need to know the basics of selecting, updating joining etc, stored procedures, triggers, indexes/relationships and normalisation.

If you're going to be doing a sysadmin kind of thing then you'll be looking more towards learning about replication, backups, security etc.
 
This is a decent course IMO, gives you plenty of examples and is probably well paced beginners.
http://www.sqlcourse.com/

To be honest having no programming experience will probably benefit you in learning SQL as it's a very different way of thinking.
If you can think of your data as sets and work out what you need to do to those sets in order to get your result you're halfway there.

I'm sure there will be plenty of people willing to help out with any problems you have on here as well!
 
You might want to steer clear of trying SQL within access; it makes it extremely frustrating.

Personally I'd grab a copy of Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 Express - it's free and comes with Management Studio which is a great management program to interface with the database.
 
I found SQL to be easy to use and pick up for the basic things, only occasionally do you need to go and look up things and there are crib sheets readily available on the net. w3 schools appears to be ok as a crash course from a quick glance ;)
 
Spunkey said:
Fixed
Click to expand...

And that's only really true if the data is set up correctly in the first place.... If the database structure is badly designed (and that's far more common than it should be), the SQL can quickly go from easy to WTF???
 
Dolph said:
And that's only really true if the data is set up correctly in the first place.... If the database structure is badly designed (and that's far more common than it should be), the SQL can quickly go from easy to WTF???
Click to expand...

Nah I'm sorry but relatively IMHO it's the easiest "language" to pick up.
 
Pho said:
You might want to steer clear of trying SQL within access; it makes it extremely frustrating.

Personally I'd grab a copy of Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 Express - it's free and comes with Management Studio which is a great management program to interface with the database.
Click to expand...
If I wanted to knock together some C# prog that interfaced with a database would SQL Server 2008 Express be OK for me? Would I be able to use VS2008 to get the C# program to work with the SQL Serer 2008 Express?

Would like to use my copy of VS2008 to get some dual-lingo projects going such as C# and SQL. :)
 
Yep, they both work perfectly well together. Infact we use Visual Studio 2008/C# and the express edition on our server at work. We don't need the features of the more expensive packages right now but it's still perfectly happy with hundreds of thousands of rows and 100 or so tables of data performing very complex calculations :).

Visual Studio makes it very simple to use SQL server too. Have a look into using datasets with SQL.

Also, here's some nice videos from Microsoft.
 
Last edited:
Pho said:
Yep, they both work perfectly well together. Infact we use Visual Studio 2008/C# and the express edition on our server at work. We don't need the features of the more expensive packages right now but it's still perfectly happy with hundreds of thousands of rows and 100 or so tables of data performing very complex calculations :).

Visual Studio makes it very simple to use SQL server too. Have a look into using datasets with SQL.

Also, here's some nice videos from Microsoft.
Click to expand...
Nice. :) Forgot about the C# Express Edition. But then I got my VS2008 free from Uni. :D

Was thinking about an F1 database of championship winners and maybe a more complicated one to record my blood sugar levels for my diabetes. :)
 
[TW]Fox;14815474 said:
Not for development, just for data mining that sort of thing really?
Click to expand...

Are you working on your own FOX for with your company (are you employed now or still some sort of student?).

If your working with a company (was it the NHS?) then use Oracle with the DM options enabled, as may well already have it.

SQL is really just a clever data extraction tool for the data mining point of view. If I was new to this again, I'd get MySQL server and Perl installed (get a linux box, or colinux and this will be a 2 minute job).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom