I think there are many things that could be improved about this course. It feels a bit rushed when it comes to the videos, which could offer a bit more information. There are some concepts that I had some difficulty grasping because they weren't explored with sufficient depth. And also, there are some other aspects which do not appear in the course, but which I feel would be useful, such as perhaps how to use database management systems themselves to extract data to your computer, since in this course you only learn how to write queries, and not how to extract the information you've queried to your computer.

In addition, I think the database used for the final task is flawed, and this gives some strange results when performing it.

On a more positive note, I did actually learn a lot from te course, and I think the proramming tasks where really helpful, and actually kind of interesting, as you get the chance to play around with your queries and experiment with the results (despite the aforementioned flaw).

I have now taken two different courses through Coursera. Python for Everyone and SQL for Data Science. The teacher for Python for Everyone actually teaches and has a book to go along with the course material for reference or even for extra practice. That was not the case for this class.

For this class, the teacher read from a script and often sounded like she was reading the script for the first time. Did she even write the script? Is she actually a data scientist or someone they just hired to read the script?

There were a few times I needed some extra help and went online to find some more examples. Several times the online examples were the same or at least very similar to the problems in the quizzes. It just made me question the skill of the person teaching the class.

But, with all that, I do feel the class gave me a good introduction to SQL and it was nice for it to be organized in a logical progression than trying to pick up SQL from various tutorials on the web.

Three stars because (1) the lecturer is good, and (2) Despite the bad "user experience" provided by this course, I did achieve my goal which was to acquire a working knowledge of SQL. Some of the final project questions were confusing, or not well explained. Some of the answers given in the rubric are wrong (Part 1 question 6). Only a few mentors are present on the Forum and they often give incomplete answers to questions. One of the homework questions is incorrectly posed; this has been pointed out 6 months ago and is still not corrected. The student must waste a significant amount of time trying to understand ill-posed or confusing coding assignment questions. This level of neglect to improving the user experience is really *not acceptable* for a paid course.The course could be greatly improved by having someone with pedagogical as well as technical knowledge to address the task of rewriting and fixing the coding questions that many users have complained about.

Overall the course was certainly helpful and worth doing. it has mostly good explanations, and good exercises, but there are various things that could use improvement. The order of the elements in each week doesn't always make sense. For example, sometimes you have harder quizes before easier ones. The content is pretty helpful, but there is an extensive amount of external reading required, which would be fine to supplement what you learn, but isn't as the only way to learn about some topics. I also feel like some important topics are missing, and are not even listed in additional reading. There is a peer reviewed assignment you need to do at the end of the course, which could be 90% autocorrected and you need to correct manually for 4 people, making you waste a lot of time. Peer reviewing is a great tool, but its a tool which makes sense for open ended assignments, but it doesn't make much sense for parts of assignments which will always have the same answer.

The lecture videos covered the topics in a very general way and gave examples of the code. However, I found there were not enough coding exercises to cover all the functions learned. In addition, I learnt the syntax and how to use the different functions mostly through my own research using external tutorial web sites. The lectures served more as an outline of topics rather than as a stand-alone learning tool. I was fine with this as I like learning independently but there could be more of a practical element to the course. The final assignment wording ought to be reviewed by the course co-ordinator rather urgently as a number of the questions were unclear and ambiguous as to what was required. The marking scheme also does not allow differentiation between good answers utilising good coding versus inelegant coding / passable code that could be better. Overall, a useful introduction to SQL and I felt like I got a good overview but lacking in technical practice.

I Think this course makes a good introduction to SQL for analytics.

However I noticed many instances where the explanations were wrong or too simple. Many times I would get frustrated because having only a partial understanding of how the functiosn work leads to many mistake : " a little knowledge can do a lot of harm ". The wording was one of my worst fears when looking at questions, often it would not be precise enough and you would wonder what they really want as an answer.

But as I said it was for me a good introduction, I wouldn't call it more than an introduction. I also learned to learn SQL by myself and to find queries that could be done in a way that agrees with my own sense of logic.

Conclusion: good introduction, the course still needs some refining.

I don't like to give negative feedback on educational courses, but I think there is a lot of room for improvement in this one. There are a lot of key concepts that are just touched on briefly, but no examples or further explanation is provided. There also needs to be more intermittent quizzes to reinforce learning and practice the material being taught, than just one quiz at the end. Another gripe - some of the questions in quizzes and tests are very poorly written.

Some positives though - it is structured and fairly short and sweet, and the progression system keeps people feeling motivated.

Overall, I would recommend people to look at other options and look for something that is more holistic and well put together.

I am giving this course an average rating because, while I found the instructor engaging, and I believe it to be a good introduction to SQL, I found the instruction lacking. Each topic was introduced separately with no instruction on how to combine code. For example, if I wanted to count something and I wanted to use a case study, I had to do my own research to figure out how to combine the two. Things that seemed like they should be simple took me a very long time to figure out. And, pay attention to where you put your commas! I wish a beginning course would at least point out something like that and if there is reasoning behind when you use a comma and when you don't, explain it.

Two recommendations

1) Given that I've moved over to another course in the series, I'm really enjoying Mode.

I think it provides a much more realistic environment vs. the one that Coursera used in the first course.

2) Several of the examples only showed the SQL queries, not the output. That makes it much harder to understand how changes in the queries would impact results.

As an example. Imagine in the section around joins if you presented a split screen. One showing the SQL query, the other the results. Then you show here's the results of a Inner Join, here's the results of a Left Join, here's the results of a Full Join, etc. and then you can compare and contrast these.

Really not sure how to rate this class. The lessons were great. I learned a lot. It was a good overview of SQL. The learning quizzes where you actually use SQL in the browser to answer the questions was slick. However, the final project was very poorly worded, most of the businesses in one table were not in the other tables because they did a poor job of selecting records from these tables to set things up which makes joins very hard to do, and the rubric at times didn't make sense or didn't even have you grade a question that you spent a lot of time on. I spent far more time on the project than I thought necessary.

So great course, terrible final project. 3 stars?

Was in need of a class to get back into database and this class was just perfect. I wouldn't say it's for a complete beginner or at least not for me. I was glad I had one to two database classes under my belt. Otherwise I would have difficulty following the class. The final assignment was tricky in it's wordings. But it's doable as long as you have watched and followed all the video. Sadie, the instructor is a great speaker and is very clear when she speaks. The best takeaway from this class was the very last video from Week 4, where she talks about lot of good practices one should follow when programming. I will keep it in my mind, definitely.

I really enjoyed the course, I think it covers the basics pretty good, as a first time using SQL I think I got a good grasp over the topic, exercises and materials were simple and easy to follow. I personally enjoy the professionalism of the teacher, she was very sweet and funny, but at the same time during multiple videos it was really hard for me to follow on what was said because the way the teacher spoke felt very unnatural, as if it was being read for the first time as she was trying to explaining it, making it very distracting and difficult to follow along.

Overall I think it's a great introductory course to SQL!

As can be seen in the discussion forum, the course is not really so well designed. I found some difficulties during the process even if I have learned programming before at intermediate level. The language sometimes is confusing. The lecture examples in the last two weeks weren't helpful in understanding the concept and improve coding, though the coding test is not hard to pass. The course has improved according to the discussion but won't be so helpful if you really want to get some solid skills in SQL. I came for this course for prerequisite and I actually studied at UC Davis before, so a little disappointing.

There is a lot of good information here. It is a good starting point. I felt like I learned a lot. However, it is clear the instructor is reading from a script, (not normally a problem), but often their cadence and speech pattern are off because they are reading. Also, the assessments don't always obviously align to the instruction. There are often questions that tie back to single sentence statments from the instructor. I would highly encourage any student to suppliment course material with other sources of information to ensure all of your questions are answered.

That being said, I am glad I took the course,

The videos were pretty high level, but provided at least a foundational knowledge of a variety of topics. I think the videos could be more in-depth. The final assignment needs some help. It has some great practice opportunities; but someone needs to provide detail about what the tables contain. It took a long time and some searching on the web to find the definition of what is in the tables in order to successfully complete the assignment. All Coursera would have to do is either provide a link to that information or provide a summary themselves in order to make the assignment better.

The lectures are fantastic but the final course project was a nightmare that was poorly worded so that you had to spend a long time trying to figure out what the questions meant before you could attempt to answer them. Also the database was restricted to 10,000 rows which meant that when trying to answer questions there were so few relevant results from queries you couldn't do much. This resulted in even more wasted time. There was no mentor help on the forum that was actually useful - other people had asked questions based on the same issues and the responses were of no help.

The interface, video demonstrations, and lectures are good; however, there is a lot of information; its hard to go back and review the information unless you re-watch the videos; there are no handouts or other notes you can reference. The quizzes and assignments are difficult to complete due to some errors with the quiz content. There needs to be glossary of terms that the learner can reference during the quiz. I'm only in week 3, so maybe the remaining weeks will get easier now that I've practice with SQL syntax a little bit.

The course covers a lot of worthwhile, useful material. But some of the lectures are poorly written. Be prepared for what the instructor says to not always make sense, or in some cases to be wrong.

The final assignment is more involved than the course materials indicate. Also, one of the questions in the final assignment is ambiguous and needs rewording. Of the five answer sets I saw, mine and the four I graded, two made a reasonable but wrong interpretation of the question.

This was a useful review of the material for me.

The course content overall is very good, with assignments being appropriately challenging and thus facilitating learning better than some other introductory Coursera courses. That said, the final assignment in Week 4 is an overkill, and the estimated duration needed of 2 hours is a severe underestimation, especially taking into account the fact that it is also peer-reviewed, requiring not 1 but 3 reviews. If you are taking this course with a deadline in mind, do leave plenty of time for the peer-reviews to come in.

This course has great potential, but as of February 2018, it is still not fully fledged out: the lectures focus on general SQL examples with data science mostly in the background. The part that I found the most relevant with regards to data science was the final peer-reviewed project. Sadly, the studied data set was badly truncated to an arbitrary size of 10,000 records in each table, without taking into account relationships between records, which made most attempts at any kind of analysis dubious.

Would have been nice with more use-cases for some of the aspect of writing queries. For instance, use-cases and examples for using different types of join, using case with text, numbers, dates, etc., more examples of subqueries, and so on.

The written assignment is worded pretty porly in some sections making it difficult to understand the aim of the question. Further, doesn't seem like instructor clarifies these issues with many posts in the discussion forum being left unanswered for years.

Mostly good content to get started with SQL but it very heavily leans towards theory, some weeks have no examples in the video lessons, or the code shown is not even run to show the results. The learning objectives in the videos last almost as much as the actual content of the course. Practical quizzes are not entirely related to the lessons and often cover subjects that weren't instructed. No feedback is given on these quizzes so they are not helpful if you didn't get it right.

There were times that I felt like I didn't understand the material enough and the examples were sometimes lacking. Also the final assignment was really poorly worded so it could be difficult at times to understand what the questions were asking for. but overall. it was helpful. If you don't know a thing about coding I would advise that you look somewhere else, since this class expects you to know the basics about coding. However if you are familiar with coding it is passable

The content of the course was good. Sometimes I got lost during the explanations, because the professor did not point to the board to help us follow what she is talking about.

The assignments also were interesting and helped us understand the theory. However, sometimes the exercises were not clearly written. I also found that there is little support in the Forums, giving the impression this is an abandoned course, which is a disrespect for those who paid for the course.