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.

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

The start of this course was farily decent, with a basic overview of data science and how it related to the use of SQL. However, I became extremely frustrated at the lack of user driven qury examples and the sheer volume of information presented without clear examples of use in actual SQL writings. There were multiple times, especially during week 2 and 3, where I felt overwhelmed with the information presented in the lectures because it was just a hose of data with no applications. Having the only use driven activites being a very simple practice quize and then graded assessments made learning the data a chore. Additionaly, the way the information was presented in those lectures post-week 1 was often confusing and overly complicated compared to other SQL training systems.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Week 4 assignment isn't prepared well for the students to use the skills they learned, and issues posted on the forum left uncleared forever.

Questions scored incorrectly though they are correct.

Most of the command line does not work.

In general, the course is not bad, but there are a number of disadvantages, ranging from minor to serious omissions. I wanted to give the course 3 stars, but the last homework was quite fun and productive (you can put 4.5, according to the rules of mathematics, round to 5, but with a very large advance). The basic skills were acquired during the last assignment.

First, about the benefits of the course:

1+ In the course, you can practice on real data without using other software, it is really useful and productive;

2+ Theoretical aspects are more than enough;

3+ Theoretical tests correspond to the lecture materials.

Now to the disadvantages (there are still more of them), first to the serious ones:

1- There is a lot of so-called "Water", information that is completely unimportant and purely theoretical. Almost the entire first week was devoted to theory ("Why is this subject important? Separation of duties among employees, etc.). I think the course would have done well without these materials. Often, one fourth of the length of each video is an explanation of what we will be studying today. I think , the student wants to quickly learn important material for him.

2- The first 2 weeks of coding looks very good, easy to understand and solve for yourself. But something strange happened on week 3, the tasks became much more complicated, they did not correspond to the lecture materials, where theoretical material was mainly given. Week 4 has already been done normally. Probably, without prompts (sometimes direct), I could not have done these tasks. It was very difficult!

3- The course is rather short (only 4 weeks), little time is devoted to programming, there is not enough practice, maybe it was even worth adding a small invaluable practice after each video.

4- The lecturer tried to convey the idea that the usual repetition of programming steps may be ineffective. Unfortunately, today, nothing is better than "I copy after the lecturer, who explains something in parallel, and then independently practice it on real data." The lecturer's methodology was not the most effective; nevertheless, after completing the course, many questions remain.

Minor disadvantages:

- For the convenience of work, you can download the presentation of the lecture, but I think it is convenient for some students to print these lectures and work. Unfortunately, the design and background were chosen in a dark color, which is why the material after printing is inconvenient to read (-a lot of paint is wasted), it is rather difficult to correct it yourself.

- The material chosen for reading by the lecturer is slightly robotic, it is convenient to set at a speed of 1.25 or 1.5.

In any case, I was able to familiarize myself with this programming language, I was able to learn something. I think one day it will suit me. At the moment, I still prefer to work in Python and other programs. I was still able to get a certificate of completion of the course. Thanks for the course and thanks for your attention to this long comment! Hope it helps you get better! Good luck :)

Great course! A solid way to introduce a learner to programming in SQL!! Sadie is an amazing online instructor! Thank you to Sadie and UC Davis for offering this course through the Coursera platform!!

Thank you for the material that was presented well and clearly. I got to know better how to use SQL for data science. Hopefully, by learning this, I can implement it in the future as a Data Analyst.

Great introductory to the SQL programming. This will definitely not only add another programming skill but also give me more capabilities programming in SAS. I would recommend this to anyone.