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A very helpful and valuable course with introductory lectures and practices to get into SQL. The lectures are very digestible, with small and useful quizzes throughout to consolidate the learning. The class is structured well: from basic concepts (what is SQL, what it is used for, what's the benefit of them) to writing slightly more complex queries, as long as you follow through, you'll have a good foundation for using SQL going forward. However, I do think the class may benefit from just one more 'glossary' lesson at the very beginning of the series before diving into the real content to connect the computer science/data science terminology with laymen terms. For example, as someone who works in the basic sciences that has a different definition for 'data modeling', learning what data modeling means in SQL was a surprising but useful fact. Additionally, the datasets could benefit from some context. For example, for the final project (or any project that may involve data manipulation from datasets provided), it would be great to include some data codebook so we know exactly what the data file and the column headers mean before creating new tables/importing data. This could simply be a tutorial video or a website link to the dataset that was provided. Overall very cool class to prepare me for further SQL adventures!

I recommend this course but not as an absolute beginner to SQL as the course suggests for the following reason: after each video tutorial there are no practice exercises to implement the expressions and clauses reviewed in the video lessons and a majority of students seem unable to complete the weekly tests without considerable outside supplementation. From a time investment perspective, I recommend studying SQL elsewhere before taking this course, and then cruise through the video lessons and use the weekly tests to practice the foundation you gained elsewhere. SQLbolt receives a lot of praise and I will head there next before considering the other courses that comprise this UC Davis SQL certificate. What this course does well: the instructor, Sadie St. Lawrence, explains the topics concisely, the videos are not too long, the supplementary articles and links are helpful, the practice tests are great for practice. Areas of improvement, some of the questions are poorly worded, there should be instruction on how to download datasets and practice them in Sandbox, the questions during the videos are superfluous but I understand that it helps prevent students from skipping the videos, not enough opportunity to practice the concepts are provided.

Probably I would give it a 3.5 if there was the option, but ok, let's leave it at 4. The reason is the way the whole course is presented, you go through all the videos and once you are done with them, there is a quiz and exams. There aren't any excersises between lessons taught in the videos, where the student can practice while the concepts are still fresh. For me that was not a problem since I have experience with SQL, but I could see someone with no experience struggling.

As a final comment, the final assesment have a big flaww: The instructions are not very clear. I am certanly not the only one that had a difficult time understanding what was expected... The biggest problem was related on the size of the data that is available for the final assignment. All is limited to 10K rows which means that when we try to join tables, for example a review on the users, not all the revies exist in the review table, but in the user table (review_count), we know that there are more reviews than what we can find on the other table. I have struggled with this because my approaches and desired analysis for the second part were not possible to realize