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Learner Reviews & Feedback for SQL for Data Science by University of California, Davis

4.6
stars
15,971 ratings

About the Course

As data collection has increased exponentially, so has the need for people skilled at using and interacting with data; to be able to think critically, and provide insights to make better decisions and optimize their businesses. This is a data scientist, “part mathematician, part computer scientist, and part trend spotter” (SAS Institute, Inc.). According to Glassdoor, being a data scientist is the best job in America; with a median base salary of $110,000 and thousands of job openings at a time. The skills necessary to be a good data scientist include being able to retrieve and work with data, and to do that you need to be well versed in SQL, the standard language for communicating with database systems. This course is designed to give you a primer in the fundamentals of SQL and working with data so that you can begin analyzing it for data science purposes. You will begin to ask the right questions and come up with good answers to deliver valuable insights for your organization. This course starts with the basics and assumes you do not have any knowledge or skills in SQL. 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. You will create new tables and be able to move data into them. You will learn common operators and how to combine the data. You will use case statements and concepts like data governance and profiling. You will discuss topics on data, and practice using real-world programming assignments. You will interpret the structure, meaning, and relationships in source data and use SQL as a professional to shape your data for targeted analysis purposes. Although we do not have any specific prerequisites or software requirements to take this course, a simple text editor is recommended for the final project. So what are you waiting for? This is your first step in landing a job in the best occupation in the US and soon the world!...

Top reviews

NK

Oct 5, 2022

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!

JG

Aug 22, 2021

I thought this course was great! Great introduction to Relational Databases and SQLite. Highly reccomend for anyone new to SQL, Databases, or someone looking to get started with a data science career.

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51 - 75 of 4,166 Reviews for SQL for Data Science

By UDHAYA P V

Apr 22, 2020

Comparing to other stuffs, this is really brilliant

By Prashanna G

Mar 5, 2020

Good course for anyone starting to learn SQL but the course needs more assignments to ensure that the learners have got a good understanding of the concepts. Also, the final project is a bit overwhelming to do without prior experience in SQL.

By Brent L

Aug 14, 2020

Examples, examples, examples. This course could be drastically improved by providing more concrete examples of each function, preferably one we can play and explore with in some exercise (not just a practice quiz) if not right there in the lesson (much like w3schools does). I felt that this would have increased my understanding, confidence, and proficiency exponentially.

By Eric W

Oct 12, 2021

Considered as a beginner-level course, the lack of depth may make some sense. However, the assignment is poorly organized and worded. Even worse are the reading materials that include lots of external sources of casual articles. Some of the contents really should be digested in the course chapters.

By max

Mar 20, 2021

lessons are not well structured, it would be so much more easy to explain sql

interactively by explainging a concept of sql, then creating a query highlighting what is particularly important of that query and then seeing the result of that querry. Instead it is done in old fashioned power point. First a set of concepts, then some additional information and then application,

E-learning allows for a much more interwoven structure, that might be more initial work for the creator of the course but it clearly would add a lot of value to the students.

Sometimes the course misses to explaing relevant detail.

For example in the last weeks lecture about Date, we learned that we could do operations like

Date('now') - DateColum, and this would return the time difference but only in years, not days, not hours. It would be intersting to know why that is.

The last assignment

By Patrick G

Sep 9, 2023

Bad teaching. Static slides so you don't know what part of the slide the teacher is talking of. The teacher stumbles upon words every few seconds which makes it hard to follow. Why don't you just cut these out? You're getting bombed with information with no practice. The practice will follow after the bombing so you can't remember what the teacher was talking about at the beginning. Why don't you follow the rhythm like "teach something - exercise it - teach something - exercise it". Now it's "teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, excercise"

The task at the end is ridiculously much work. Should be splitted all over the course. Also nobody wants to review that much stuff.

What's good? Well you'll learn the SQL basics but it's a hard fight until then.

By Jennifer S

Jul 17, 2019

These lectures seem incomplete. For several sections, I had to Google more information to understand the lecture topic.

This course is listed as a beginner level course with no prerequisite, but throughout the lessons I felt like I was missing some key basic information. The course recommendation is 20 hours, 3-5 hours a week. The first week fell into that parameter, but after that the hours required increased each week, with the last week being about twelve hours including the final project.

Ideally, this course considers adding in more complete explanations for the examples in the lectures (including outputs), more practice coding, and more depth on exploring data and making inferences from your queries.

By Alfred S

Jun 29, 2020

Some of the quizzes do not make sense and I have to select something that is wrong to pass. It is really hard to follow sometimes and the content of the video mostly does not relate to the content of the tests. I had to google most stuff that came up in the videos, many quotes from w3 school (another provider of programming courses).

I choose to pay for courses on coursera so that I do not have to read through tons of free material online or get quoted content that is for free on other learning platforms. This course taught me some neat things but mostly wasted my time.

By Rohan L

Jul 22, 2020

I finished the first course in the series, however it quickly became apparent in the second course that the instructors are unprepared and the assignments are thrown together without student learning as a priority.

If you want to learn SQL or Database systems, I highly suggest taking "Modern Big Data Analysis with SQL" from the CLOUDERA team and "Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence" from the U Colorado team.

Both of those course paths are much more informative, structured, and up to date. You are wasting your time if you choose this path.

By Aron R

Feb 22, 2021

This was a shockingly different approach to teaching a software language. I did not enjoy the style whatsoever, and found myself constantly seeking outside sources to understand what was glossed through. Unless you have a strong programming background, I would not recommend this particular class. Instead, seek something where you will complete SQL code yourself, with explanations of syntax, structure, and purpose, specific to the format you will be using. You'll do yourself a favor by doing so.

By Toby C

Jul 13, 2020

I felt the course was put together in a hurry. There was a lot of information that was incomplete or just plain incorrect. The assignments were even more vague than I was expecting. OTOH It does lead you through learning very basic SQL.

Too much focus was given to SQLite which is not an industry standard. Perhaps using a free DBMS like Postgres or MySQL would have been better. Are there any interactive T-SQL or Oracle engines that could be put in a box like the SQLite here?

By Ana

Jun 9, 2020

This is the first course from Coursera that I didn't like at all. For absolute beginners is not suitable. There is only theories and somehow boring because there isn't any examples to do at the same time to understand the content better.

I recommend to add more examples to the weekly courses like the ones for the final project so we can understand the theory more.

By Sean A

Feb 15, 2022

This course gives a pretty good theoretical overview, but is not practical. There are limited exercises and often the examples are poorly explained. Someone starting from ZERO SQL experience will not succeed in this course. You would be better off going through https://sqlzoo.net/wiki/SQL_Tutorial and then returning to this course.

By Ahmad S

Jul 21, 2020

Nice course! Only giving it low stars because the assignments are so out of data. Please update your assignments corresponding to updates to Database.

By Javier G

Aug 18, 2020

Hola, no es tan bueno que no puedas correr código mientras aprendes con ejemplos.

By Salim A

Jul 1, 2020

It's very basic SQL, definitely not challenging for anyone with SQL experience

By Brendan J O

Mar 12, 2022

During the course, I wrote a review, and gave three stars. But now, I sense the need to change it and add to it. Yes, I have actually changed the final rating from three stars to only one star. (Below is a quick review, because I don't want to waste too much time on it.)

In the beginning, it was claimed that certain participation in some so-called "discussion" was optional, but you had to participate in order to even be allowed to move on with the course. So the claim was false, and no one cared to take care of it. Or if the claim was indeed true, then indeed you did not have to participate, and it was indeed optional, and of course in that case you would not be allowed to move on. Either way, this immediately created a "bad taste" so to speak.

There seemed to be errors or sloppiness in the quiz questions and in some of the sets of multiple choice answers, which was annoying. Some quiz questions were not very clearly put, so sometimes -- I would even say often -- it was difficult to understand the question. Sometimes it also seemed as though some of the quiz code questions suddenly went too far compared to the material taught, which is in part due to the course's lack of practice.

The instruction videos were also poor, because they were not very well optimized. For example, the instructor's audio had a lot of "wet sounds" in it, so to speak. Also, the instructor's teaching was unpleasant to listen to, because it sounded awkward, as though overly scripted or very unnatural. There were also errors where some word or name did not match with code on-screen. Maybe she is a good instructor outside of Coursera, but you could not tell by these videos. Sometimes, the audio was even cut off, or so it seemed.

Because of the earlier mentioned lack of practice from the course, you must do a lot of practice yourself. I already knew some things here and there, and usually find my way around computers, and so on, anyway, so sometimes I had an easier time. I also understood some of the statistical concepts they asked about later on.

But even if so, I decided to quit during the final assignment, because

(1) in the beginning of the final assignment (or rather right before it) it was unclear how to proceed on Coursera itself about it, and I wasted time finding out;

(2) because of the course's sloppiness, it looked as though, after using only SQLite in the course, you suddenly had to use MySQL in Coursera's online sandbox (which may not have been a big deal, but is still strange a choice for a course), but really you had to enter some link and use the online SQLite interface with the Yelp dataset, which I only found out after roaming the so-called "discussion" fora for some time, wasting time in doing so;

(3) the assignment itself had questions that should not even be asked, because some of the (statistical) topics were not even covered in the course, and, again, there had hardly been any practice in the course itself to prepare you, making it an even poorer course.

I read some of the other reviews, especially the ones criticizing the course. Overall, relatively there are not that many giving low ratings, but they are right: it really is a poor course. I don't understand why the course has such a high score.

In short, it is a poor course, no one cares to update it properly, and I would recommend to any other course taker to get the most out of it, preferably for free, and then to leave as quickly as possible.

By Norman S P

Jul 11, 2021

The best thing I can say is that the deadlines motivated me to complete my week's studies. Unfortunately the instructor, content and presentation were really poor for this course. The quality here really serves as a stain (in my eyes) on the reputation of UC Davis and Coursera.

The instructor continually stumbled over her words as she read whatever teleprompter she was reading from during the presentations. It appears she didnt write the presentation herself as she stumbled through her presentations often creating wordy non-sensical explanations. It appears she never practiced the monologue before filming.

In addition there were many mistakes in the code in the powerpoint presentations. This course has been around for many years with hundreds of thousands of students. You'd think that by now they may have decided they should re-film the course and correct the simple and blatant errors that any complete beginner can see clearly in the presentations.

Otherwise, it's an ok course if you want to use it as a starting point to your self-teaching. I would recommend anyone taking this course to study with other materials on the side as well in order to truly become proficient and to help them know the subject matter better than the instructor who clearly is no expert due to the many and simple mistakes she propagates through her course.

By Katherine N

Feb 18, 2022

This was the first course I ever took on Coursera and I honestly wondered if they were all like this and how Coursera was able to stay in business. I stopped halfway through for a variety of reasons. The instructor was incredibly awkward on camera and just read a teleprompter the entire time. I ended up doing some other courses (by other instructors) and realized how many basic pieces of information she had left out. There was very little hands-on practice throughout the course and the quizzes wouldn't even show you the correct coding if you got it wrong, so you weren't able to learn what you did wrong. Glad that I have found some other courses to take on this subject, but I'll be avoiding this teacher/school from now on.

By christian s

Apr 12, 2022

This is not a beginner course, it is very high level with little time or explanations spent on each topic. The quizes expect syntax that has not been gone over in order to correctly answer the questions. I received better explantions for what was needed from W3school brief high level explanaton then I did this ocurse.

The instructor tends to stumble over her words alot which causes confusion and the examples within the presentation are not really clear as they arent based off real world, just table 1 table 2 etc.

I debated if I should review or not as I wonder also is this just not witin my leanring style, but reallized in a course of this type it should fit a variety learning styles as the Google courses do.

By Sara F

Jan 3, 2020

Terrible and frustrating. My previous knowledge was literally zero, so I did learn something at the end,but the lectures are poor and non stimulating at all. Worst of all, the exercises are awful. Most of the time the task is not clear, there are no example to guide you and the material given in the lectures are most of the time totally useless. I felt very frustrated. Not a completely waste of time, but I would never recommend this course to anyone. I really wanted to learn something, but everything was against it. I speak to the creator of this class, seriously try to do this course pretending you are new to this topic. I will be clear it is very very very bad designed.

By Rashid S S

Jul 28, 2020

The course was not easy to understand. Because the lessons were not sufficient enough to understand the questions in quiz and final exams. I think if all the things are described in a more elaborate fashion with a lot of examples it would be easy for the learners. Actually in this course I've to relay more on google and internet rather than my course lessons which was very disappointing. I personally think this course is not for a beginner student who really wants to learn about sql.

By John O O

Mar 28, 2022

Not too happy with this course, I have run into many incosistencies with the course materials and have no responses (along with many others posting in the forums) to the issues at hand. The first course does not 'flow' into the second course. Conflicting instructions given in pdfs and by instruction in 'solution' videos. Hard to find 'mentions' to cloning reports. Etc. Feels kinda like a waste of time trying to connect the dots as provided by the instructor/instructions.

By Yujin L

Jan 20, 2023

There are not enough examples in between the lectures. It's impossible to remember all the SQL commands if the course does not provide practice questions before the quiz. Also, the instructor keeps moving around while she's explaining which makes it hard to focus, and the course is not interactive at all.

By Victoria K

Jul 14, 2020

I can't pay for the course to get certificate. The free 7 days subscriptions never ends. So I can't send the tests to get results and get the certificate.. Lost a lot of time... Too bad