THE GOOD: The course material was high quality as usual: well done videos, plenty of exercise, external resources, hands on style and a lot of useful topics were covered. THE BAD: I don't think this course was well thought through from a purely didactic standpoint. I didn't always have the information I needed to follow new lectures or answer questions. Some came later in the course, which means the topics order is wrong. Some were never covered, like SQL IN. Sometimes I got the feeling that I was supposed to be studying those external liks, but then the estimated time for this course would be totally underestimated. That 1h of this course lasted longer than 1h from the previous is a general feeling I had. Maybe because the Google Analytics Certificate, this fifth course covered harder subjects that the previous, expecially SQL. First, that should impact the expected time to complete. Second, I don't think the vague definitions, loose rather than formal, hands on rather than theoretical approach used so far is enough for a topic like SQL. I would have appreciated a bit more formalism and a bit more theoretical context.

I think this course had it's ups and downs. It was easily the messiest of the courses so far because the instruction of concepts was all over the place. One moment your learning about one SQL function, then all of a sudden your introduced to like three other ones that have never been taught until like later into the material. The instructor also did poorly in teaching and explaining what she was doing for some of the SQL queries, especially in week 2 and 3, where she just types a SQL query out and done, without any explanation of what she is doing or why she is doing it. This was one of the courses I was excited about coming into the program, and even though I learnt a lot about the different SQL functions, I felt pretty disappointed in how it was taught. Kind of wished we had the previous instructor for the data cleaning to teach this course as well because she made it easier to understand and actually went through the step by steps of different queries.

Only one so far that has a bunch of mistakes that was fixed after the fact with text. I know you are trying to follow the script and just powering through but seriously. Either reshoot your video or just fix the mistakes right there is fine. I alreayd know sql and this is making it so confusing.

There are a lot of new concepts introduced in this one and they can be more confusing for people with no sql experiences. It might be a lot clearer to just run everything through again. Also it is ok to go back and forth or even bottom up in some cases. At a lot of points the instructor is referencing "AS shorthands" before they were created. It was again very confusing. It is the internet video length shouldn't be a problem. I suggest you watch how harvard's cs50 professor Malan explain harder concepts to complete beginners.

I was expecting this course to train me in order to make analysis by myself in order to answer specific questions, and I finished it without having gained that skill.

This course is really useful in order to learn advanced functions from spreadsheets and SQL. Nevertheless, I think is too guided when it comes to actually performing analysis in order to answer questions: Most of the hands-on practices directly show you whats the SQL you have to apply or the steps and formulas to use in a spreadsheet in order to answer some question.

I would have liked to find challenges and practices where the course presents data, ask some questions and the student has to use the gained skills in SQL and or spreadsheets in order to answer it, without any guidance.

It covered worthwhile topics, and in particular, I got a lot out of the lessons on temp tables. However, in general, the instruction and opportunities to practice and get feedback about certain SQL functions were totally inadequate. There's simply no way that a learner would be able to perform certain functions (JOINS) on their own based on the instruction contained here. Also, I found some of the links to other sources (like the one to red_gate.com) to be too technical to be useful, as it referenced "variables," something not even discussed in the lesson about temp tables. Please review your content and provide sufficient information so that the end user can take advantage of what's included in the content you link to.

This has been my least favorite course so far, I think it kind of rushes through topics that would benefit from having more in-course practice opportunities. Like one of the hands on activities has you copy paste the code for the entire activity, which I think kind of defeats the point. I think there needs to be more opportunities to mentally work through the structure of subqueries. Maybe adding optional "Challenge" problems would help build out this section more. I just feel like with the course alone I only got a very brief overview of some of the more complicated SQL applications, which maybe was the point, but it would be nice to have more opportunities to practice those concepts within the course itself.

Compared to the first 4 course of the certification, this one is much more technical and I thought that they didn't deliver it as well as they should have. First of all, the tutor is anywhere as pleasant as the other ones. Especially after the tutor from course 4. Her explanations are sometimes a bit off and she also makes a few mistakes, which are corrected via a pop-up message. Her SQL coding is a little bit "sloppy" and there is a lot of things that are "assumed" and should be explained better. I think it's absolutely necessary to take a complete SQL course from somewhere else if you are seriously planning to pursue a career in Data related jobs.

This course drops a little in quality compared to the previous ones. It seems it can use some quality control, as sometimes concepts are used before being introduced (e.g. GROUP BY), and some materials contain errors, or are not editable without tricks in Google Sheets.

As previous courses, this uses Google Sheets and BigQuery as practice environments and these work really well. The introduction is balanced and introduces a great number of tools to use in each environment. It doesn't go very deep though and leaves several central SQL concept unexplained. I would recommend some further training in SQL as addition to this course.

Following along with queries can be bit difficult in these lesson some of this issues need to be fixed so students are able to follow along and learn. Week 3 Count & Count Distinct does not seem to be the correct format when running the query there are spaces in the query I stayed on this video for 30 minutes trying to work this query but I was unable to I wish the instructor walked through the queries to make them more explainable or explain where there are spaces in the query when we were advised that there wouldn't be any spaces within a query. Its frustrating leaving an assignment unsure of how to run the query.

I personally am loving this course, and everything was perfect uptil this course. Everything was messy in this one like in one of the videos the subtitles didnt match the speaker, or for the first two weeks speaker's voice was really low, even when i wore headphones. but most of all, during the last 2 weeks, it seemed like a lot was trying to be fit in and concepts were not being taught, instead only links and urls were given and it was upto us to read and understand. the self reflection assignments were a hassle to deal with. i would've preferred a lot more hands on, easier step by step procedure for sql stuff

This course could have been so rewarding by learning so many new and great things. I wasn't too happy with the instructor because she went over the SQL or spreadsheet functions way too fast. I believe that the instructors sometimes forget that we have little knowledge in an area which they have mastered. PLEASE slow down when explaining and sharing your knowledge with us. We really do want to learn as much as we can but we reach our limits often because the instructors are rushing through the courses. Other then that, I loved learning so many new things. Thank you for offering a course like this!!

Even with some familiarity with SQL and spreadsheets, Part 6 will challenge you to understand intermediate SQL syntax at strange intervals, then rubberband back to more simple forms of it. There are also queries that don't function with the wildcard "*." the way they're supposed to, nor are there many reminders as to what that is. They talk about it maybe once. This is more of a BigQuery issue, and not a general SQL syntax issue. The lessons are harder at this point, but overall the repetition is there, it will leave you with PLENTY of learned material to grow from. It's just difficult at times.

I learned a lot in this course, but the primary presenter was not a very good teacher of the material, even though she clearly knows the subjects very well. She introduced a lot of concepts, but in some cases, she overexplained simple concepts that had already been covered in previous courses within this certificate program, while in other cases she suddenly began to use more complex queries without any explanation.

I do think that the quizzes and assignments had fewer overall issues with questions that didn't make sense or were ambiguous, but some of those issues were still present throughout.

Hands-on activity through BigQuery had many mistakes in the code, which required troubleshooting. I eventually figured out how to fix it, but since these activities were meant to introduce how to use new commands it made it difficult. I also think some readings/activities were out of order. I would do an activity where I was stumbling through how to use JOIN, TEMP TABLES, or a pivot table, then after the activity there would be a reading that clearly explained the format of the commands. Having the reading first would have helped.

The instructor needed to go a lot slower. Were it not for the fact that I'm already quite familiar with SQL I would be lost. There should also be a little more instruction for excel. Not everyone uses Google Sheets and the functionality can be wildly different at times, making the translation over in assignments difficult.

Also the instructions for doing certains in Big Query need to be updated. Seems like there was a different way to do things before and the documentaion was never updated. Not very intuitive.

Some are very repetitive and I got really bored. I have a background in Computer science so much of this knowledge overlaps but I still found myself getting off track even though I love SQL. I wish there were more "challenging" interactive questions like some other practice websites in order to really understand the concepts instead of multiple choice. I know its a beginner course, but if I was a beginner I think I would benefit from trying to solve harder queries and data validation/conditioning exercises.

Of the 5 certificates from this series I've completed so far, I found this one to be the most difficult to follow and least information-rich. I think those two observations might be related.

To be clear, I did not find the concepts difficult, and when I engaged outside resources to fortify my learning I got through the tests just fine. What was different from the previous 4 certificates in the series was how much information I had to go and find on my own vs. what was clearly presented.

Based on comparison to the four completed, I would rate this the lowest and least effective. Pace at times was much too fast and the instructor even stated that some of the content is advanced...? Not sure why that content was included, but recommend editing the content and pace. On the other hand, if the quick pace was needed to cover all of the material, then recommend, editing early courses to remove some of the redundant material to "buy" time for this course.

I think this is a good course but I feel this course is set for people that have previous knowledge with spreadsheets and SQL already because there is not enough repetition on the material to be able to remember all the functions that can be done within spreadsheets and SQL. There is suppose to be a way to go back and redo any courses or materials that you previously learned, yet I have not found a way to go back to any courses or material that I have already completed.

This course was so effective with a huge amount of data and new knowledge. Thank yo so much to give me this opportunity to learn them. However, I would like to inform you that some parts like "subqueries" and "join" which are really complicated did not have sufficient explanation and I was confused. Thus I try to use other source to understand these concept. I would like to suggest to focus on this course and add more lesson and practice. Thank you so much again

The overall content of the course is good. However, the structure of the course isn't as good, in many places there were repeated topics and topics that should have been explained earlier in the course. In addition in a few instances in the videos, the SQL code wasn't correct. After repeatedly checking the code, I find the correct code in the other forums. This section is by far the was the only course in the series where I rated the course so low.

This is more a criticism of the guided quizzes where you practice, text was difficult to read and distracting because too much was going on. The instructor in the videos was great. I didn't enjoy downloading and then uploading data from coursera onto my laptop then uploading again onto BigQuery. After two times it was tedious. One of the practice SQL code actually did not work in BigQuery despite a literal copy/pate which was frustrating.

The course covered most of the aspects related to analyzing data. But the course could have been better if it focused more upon elaborating the postioning and usage of different functions, it felt like the course left out the "WHY" part of SQL functions and commands which will eventually confuse beginners a lot. Videos lacked the elaborative part in the course which will slow down the learning process for a beginner.

This course has provided many good information. However, those good information are surface information.

Instead of repetiting same information in many chapters, i think it is best teching deeper into analyzing data with trends, critical think with data, and predict trends. Most analyzing features or approachs in here are basic and does not give newbie any outlier from other newbie who does not take this course.