To improve the technical skills this course mostly helpfull for the sql database.

A nice course to get introduced to writing SQL queries in Data science. Provides hands on exercises that boost confidence. Genuinely appreciate the ease with which SQL topics are covered

T​his was the first Coursera course I took, and it'll probably be the last. I did learn some SQL basics, but there are a lot of issues with this course.

-​My biggest problem with this course (and Coursera) is plagiarism. You're randomly assigned to grade 3 peers' final assignments. I graded the first and second assignments, and on the third realized that it was an exact duplicate of the first. I reported the third for plagiarism, but I couldn't go back and report the first one, so that person just got a good grade for a 100% plagiarized assignment. If I hadn't been randomly assigned those two people, I wouldn't have known the assignments were copied. Coursera clearly doesn't have even the most basic automatic plagiarism checker set up, which would've caught exact duplicates. If the only way to identify and report plagiarism is for a student to get randomly assigned 2-3 assignments that happened to be duplicates, realize it, and report it, there's a major problem. This completely devalues the certificate.

N​ow on to other issues:

-A​s other reviewers have mentioned, the final assignment is a big jump from the work up to that point, and there aren't enough smaller assignments to test out skills. Lots of things that are mentioned in the lectures aren't included in the assignments, so you don't get to practice.

-T​here are a ton of posts in the discussion forums mentioning various problems with course material, like typos or confusingly worded assignments--these posts go back as far as 4 years, and the same problems are still in the materials. Even easy fixes like typos in assignments haven't been addressed.

-T​he moderators/course assistants/Coursera staff sometimes reply to questions in the forum, but it's rare, and the posts they reply to seem random. The forums are also flooded with 4+ years of sometimes pointless posts, so it's basically impossible to find anything relevant to whatever question you have.

-​Many of the (automatically graded) assignments don't have examples of the correct code in the feedback, so if you get something wrong, you'll have no idea what you should be doing instead. The lectures don't come close to providing enough information to complete assignments, either.

-​The rubric for the peer-graded final assignment is a mess. On some questions, the grader is asked if the code "looks correct." Well, maybe? I know that there are usually multiple ways to get an answer with coding, but there aren't any examples of what a correct answer looks like. If I got one of the questions wrong, there would be no feedback to help me figure out where I went wrong. Some questions have the option to give a grade of zero if the person left the question blank, but not all--so you could leave a question completely blank and still get points because there's no other option.

-​One of the questions on the final assignment asks students to look at two columns of data and report whether they think there's a correlation. You can't do that. It's a ridiculous question. Especially because you can only see 10 rows of data at a time. And the course designer knows that, because the rubric says you get full points for attempting to answer the question--"It doesn't matter whether the interpretation appears to make sense based on the data or not." Why does this question even exist?

I​ had some other issues, but this has been a lot of typing and I'm pretty sure I'm yelling into the void anyway. TL;DR: don't take this course, and it's probably a good idea to avoid Coursera generally.

Well it was a short course, the assignments are a little bit repetitive (mostly in the last). The course reviews every 'practical' aspects of SQL, how to assemble the bricks while writing queries,...

Better than I hoped for. I learned everything I needed in order to feel competent in the basics of SQL. It was just the right amount of instruction and challenge, perfect for a beginner like me.

The course met my expectations as someone with no real prior knowledge. I now feel much more confident.

The lectures were well structured and the were a good amount of exercises. THe only reason I am giving the course 4-stars is due to the final exercise. Some of the questions were vague/not worded clearly enough. I had to dig through the forum to try to understand the questions.

Overall I would recommend this course!

While I did learn some useful bits, I found the course lacking. I think it could have been much improved if certain conditions would have been met:A. More practice! You don't learn a computer language by hearing about it, you learn by using it. The only practice this course had were the quizzes, and they were far from sufficient. I would expect each lesson to be followed by at least some practice. I often found myself venturing to different websites in order to practice what I had learned, and learned more from that than I did from the actual course.B. Better explanations. I found the explanations short and sometimes lacking. Moreover, at times there was no synchronization between what the instructor was saying and what was presented on screen (e.g. she was talking about products when the example presented data of employess). It's a small thing but can be very confusing. It is very important to be precise here. Again, I found myself reading elsewhere in order to better understand certain concepts, which I might as well have learned elsewhere altogether.C. Examples! Again, you don't learn a computer language by hearing about it. You learn by using it or by seeing how it is used. Whenever I'm taught something, I want to be shown examples of possible ways to use it. Examples were scarce and incomprehensive.D. Applicability. The course is called "SQL for Data Science", yet I found very little in the way of applying SQL to data science. I would expect a lot more tips and tricks and examples of real-life problems and how an actual data scientist would tackle them. There was almost none of that. There were positives as well. The instructor was pleasant, the course was pretty well structured and did provide an introduction (although not much more) to SQL. But I did not get what I was hoping for.

I originally wrote this review about halfway through the course and gave it 2 stars, but I just got to the final project and am amending it to be 1 star. My reasoning for one star is as follows:

1) The instruction is often difficult to follow. The instructor will narrate with a snippet of code and a table or set of tables on the screen, but there won't be any visual aid to help follow along, as the slides are static. She also frequently stumbles over herself while reading from her teleprompter, so the combination of the static slides and her directionless cadence makes it very hard to keep track of what is going on.

2) The evaluations are split into two types, one of which is informational, one of which is coding. The questions of the former type very rarely reflect any sort of understanding and are more about rote regurgitation of information found on the (poorly formatted) slides. After taking a quiz or two, you come to realize that virtually any time a list is written on the screen, you had better write down every item on that list because there will be a "select all that apply" question at the end. Sometimes writing it all down doesn't even work, as she doesn't take care to make sure her headers and data match up. A parallel to the kinds of lists she often uses would be:

Types of Vegetables

1. Celery, 2. Cauliflower, 3. Vitamin C is good!, 4. Carrots, 5. Make sure to eat your vegetables!

The subject she is teaching revolves entirely around key-value pairs, and her slides don't reflect any sort of understanding of that relationship. If that table only accepted "vegetable" as a data type, she would get an error.

3) The coding evaluations, on the other hand, are extremely difficult as they extend the information well beyond what was taught in the preceding lecture, and almost no time is given to allow you to explore how the code works. The course thrusts you into a situation where you're writing code in a language with which you have almost no familiarity (and SQL has pretty poor error handling, and no custom error handling is written to help you understand where you went wrong). I strongly, strongly recommend Coursera learners take another class or use some other tool to learn SQL. I used a free instructional tool and felt so much more competent after 10 minutes of messing around on it than I did after watching an hour of lecture.

4) The material is often presented as her opinion rather than factual information that should be learned. I've taken a number of courses on Coursera, and they've been treated professionally, where information delivered was generally factual. If the professor wanted to inject opinion, it would be made clear it was opinion, and an evaluation may read, "Which of these may make x easier" or something like that. This instructor will phrase things like, "What did I say was the most important thing to know..." which just seems unprofessional. EDIT: Another example in response to a correct quiz answer was "You're not actually writing the query to the database or anything. What you're doing is you're just kind of storing it for the time being."

Look at that last sentence.

I could go on, but all in all, this course didn't even begin to resemble the level of professionalism or quality I've seen in other courses on Coursera. It reminds me of being peer taught during my education degree, full of teaching methods and lacking instructional skill. However, it's the only one that popped up as a beginner's course on SQL, so I finished it out. I regret doing so.

Could you please give at least ***ONE EXAMPLE*** for each function introduced in lecture videos???

At week 3 & 4, more complex functions/features were introduced with ***JUST CODES, NO SAMPLE OUTPUT***!? How do you expect me to know what the output would be?

You may say I could run the code and to it myself, I learn better that way. True, BUT it is the situation of "1-minute job for you, but 10-minute job for me". You are leveling up the bar of who can benefit from the course - this should not be the case for beginner level course!

This course is incredibly poorly designed and does not provide sufficient guidance to learn SQL.

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.

As a beginner, the course is easy to understand and follow, and the course teaches a lot of useful commands. However, I think the course still has a lot to imrove. Some codings in the lectures have problems (e.g. lack ','). When introducing new commands, the teacher did not show the running results of the coding example. I also think the course lacks some application in the real world. Maybe providing more real business cases will help students understand better about when some commands will be applied.

The final project assignment is a bit of a mess. Some of the questions are very unclear, and the database provided is incomplete in ways that make it hard to address some of the questions. I also found the lecture format and materials frustrating. I learn much better by reading and by being able to go back and reference materials, but that really isn't possible in this course -- the doesn't contain any of the actual code examples and is often really vague.

Really disappointed with this course. Videos were helpful and informative but left many things unanswered without pointing learners to what these unexplained areas might be (so learner has to google and search about their confusion when they feel lost because something wasn't covered).

The assessments and final project were the most disappointing part, however. The Yelp dataset was error-prone and incomplete which totally tarnished the final exercise. Questions were confusing and misleading, and the only saving grace were the wonderful community forums where users helped each other to troubleshoot all the sloppy mistakes in the dataset and wording of questions. Worst of all, these posts/errors are 3-4 years old and UC Davis has done nothing to remedy as of December 2021. It feels as if this course has had zero attention since initially being published and is riddled with confusing errors and dead-ends that are extremely frustrating for someone to learn a new programming language. When one can't trust the instructor's accuracy, it becomes impossible to navigate a course like this. Very disappointed a major university would put out such low-quality, sloppy, and neglected course materials.

The lectures were poorly delivered, and there was NO OUTPUT shown for any command that got discussed. It's not clear to me whether Ms St. Lawrence ever tried out any of the stuff she was talking about. Then the "final project" is (a) quite tedious; (b) in parts quite a bit more complicated than anything actually done before; and (c) its grading is "peer review" which seems to mean you may wait a week or two, or ten? before your assignment gets graded... and thus you get more dollars sucked out of your wallet from the monthly subscription. I bailed out before my 7-day free trial was over, and felt even the hours I put in to that point were a waste. If you want a significantly better intro to SQL, look at the "PostgreSQL for everybody" specialization by Chuck Severance and UMichigan.

Fortunately, this was not my first introduction to SQL, or I would have been unable to complete the final assignment, or even some of the modular quizzes. There is almost no hands-on learning, just talking head videos where the instructor doesn't even show you the actual coding syntax for many of the examples. Nothing builds or is linked together conceptually. And the SQLite interface is very limited, so when it comes to the over-complicated final assignment you have to perform coding backflips to get anything meaningful out of the appalling dataset. I cannot recommend this course to anyone.

The Course examples were very little. Demonstration of new commands while teaching them would've been very helpful. But, there were little to no examples related to the teaching materials. There were gaps in concepts that required further reading to understand. Some syntaxes were used before being taught.

The course starts with the definition of SQL and how it is different from other computer languages. This course also provides related reading resources, which helped me gain more insights into this field and come to know about good resources from where I can practice this newly acquired skill set. This course also introduced ER diagrams, necessary clauses, and operators, including WHERE, BETWEEN, IN, OR, NOT, LIKE, ORDER BY, and GROUP BY, subqueries, and joins with advantages and disadvantages. You will be able to use the wildcard function to search for more specific or parts of records, including their advantages and disadvantages and how best to use them. You will be able to discuss how to use basic math operators and aggregate functions like AVERAGE, COUNT, MAX, MIN, and others to begin analyzing our data. It also discussed how to modify strings by concatenating, trimming, changing the case, and using the substring function. Also discussed the date and time strings specifically. You will be able to use case statements and finish this module by discussing data governance and profiling. You will also be able to apply fundamental principles when using SQL for data science. You'll be able to use tips and tricks to apply SQL in a data science context.

It is a very introductory course on SQL. I have never learn any SQL before and I can catch everything she said. People might find it extremely easy, but in learning programming you must make sure all the basics are well known to you before using them in more complex situations.

Excellent course in all basics of SQL.

Built-in sandbox is the most important plus of the course.

A lot of practice, a balanced number of lectures.

At the end of a good project that allows you to try out all the methods learned in the course.

Excellent.

I loved this class. It was the perfect introduction to SQL coding. It was easy to follow and I learned a ton. -Rick

Comparing to other stuffs, this is really brilliant

The Content of the course is good, quizzes are fine, but the final project is a total mess up, inconsistent and don't contain the course potential, so you won't be able to apply the knowledge by doing it

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.

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.