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SQL for NEWBS: Weekender Crash Course (Udemy.com)

Data Analysis for Data Scientists, Marketers, & Business/Product folks. Using MySQL but appropriate for all SQL.

Created by: A Course You'll Actually Finish

Last updated September 2022

Our take

Based on the ratings of 15,820 students, a sample of their written reviews and the syllabus, as the course stood in September 2022. No course pays to be reviewed.

This short crash course is built for people outside tech, marketers, product folks, recent grads, who need working SQL for a resume or a new job. Instructors David Kim and Peter Sefton frame every lesson around a pretend Blockbuster business, so queries feel like real analyst work instead of abstract syntax. At 3.3 hours across 33 lectures it covers basic queries and a handful of level two concepts, not a full database course.

Reviewers like the humor and pacing, several say the brainbusters and quizzes made concepts stick, and one total beginner reports writing real queries within three hours. Complaints cluster around setup: a few reviewers struggled installing HeidiSQL or switching between MySQL, SQLPro, and the read only SQLSnack environment with little instructor support. Others found the later brainbuster sections disorganized, like planned lectures that never got made, and asked for more quizzes and topics like CASE statements.

The course sits at the entry end of the SQL for business analytics category, quicker and lighter than deeper competitors that teach schema and database design. Content hasn't changed since 2022, so it still skips CREATE, DROP, and table management. For someone who just needs to put SQL on a resume or run basic reports, it delivers fast. Anyone planning to build or manage databases should treat it as a starting point and follow it with a more technical course.

Best forTotal beginners, marketers, and job seekers who want fast, practical SQL basics.
Skip it ifAnyone needing CREATE, DROP, or real database design and management skills.

Pros

  • Frames every query around a mock Blockbuster business instead of abstract syntax
  • Humor and pacing keep total beginners engaged through the material
  • Quizzes and brainbusters reinforce each concept as students go
  • One beginner reviewer reports writing real queries within three hours

Cons

  • Setup with HeidiSQL and switching tools confuses beginners with little support
  • Skips CREATE, DROP, and database design, only basic querying
  • Later brainbuster sections feel disorganized, like unfinished lectures
After three hours online I feel confident and comfortable writing queries and progressing with my new skill set.
Olga Odell, a student

Listed as All Levels but really built for non-technical beginners with zero coding background.

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What you will learn

  • Analyze user behavior
  • Find actionable customer/business insights
  • Make data-driven decisions
  • Measure and track marketing efforts
  • Discover sexy marketing stats (e.g. 1 in 4 people love toast!)

Course content

4 sections · 33 lectures · 3.3 hours of video 5 quizzes, 4 articles

  1. 1Welcome! 3 free previews3 lectures · 1 quiz · 14 min
  2. 2Intro to MySQL 2 free previews3 lectures · 2 quizzes · 22 min
  3. 3Basic Queries20 lectures · 2 quizzes · 1.6 hours
  4. 4Level 2 Concepts 1 free preview7 lectures · 1.1 hours

Who it is for

The instructor says it suits

  • Marketers
  • Startup folks
  • Non-technical folks
  • Aspiring Data Analysts
  • Recent College Grads
  • Job-seekers
  • Product Managers

What you need before you start

  • No previous technical knowledge required

How it compares

Against the other 388 rated Udemy courses in SQL on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.7 out of 5higher than 89% of them
  • Reviews15,820#16 of 389 by number of reviews
  • Length3.3 hoursshorter than 72% of them
  • Last updatedSeptember 2022earlier than 57% of them

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Quality Score

Content Quality
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Video Quality
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Qualified Instructor
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Course Pace
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Course Depth & Coverage
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Overall Score : 94 / 100

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Course Description

Buff up your resume/CV and become interview-ready by learning real-world SQL in this course.

This SQL course has been taken by fine marketing and product folks at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Lyft, and Udemy.

Your Story:

Bill was looking to move into a more analytical role and saw SQL as a requirement in the job listings he saw.  He wanted to add "SQL" as a skill to his resume/CV with a clean conscience and back it up if any questions arose in the interview.  But getting there would take forever. Better to just "fake it til' you make it"... right?

                  Joe was working in a marketing position at a small company. He had a bunch of creative ideas but sometimes felt like he was shooting in the dark and guessing at what customers were doing.  If only he had some insights about user behavior so he could be a more data-driven marketer. But data analysis is only for technical folks… right?

  Our Story: 

                  David and Pete joined Udemy with little to no technical experience.  But after a lot of trial and error, headaches, and help from their friends, they got good enough to uncover unique insights for themselves, their team, and their company using SQL. They were able to discover interesting things about user behavior, create dashboards to track and measure progress on team goals, pull data for the exec team to use in investor pitch decks, and get data driven about decisions they made. They've since helped many team members buff up their data analysis skills and helped students land jobs!

  What You'll Learn: 

                  If you have no technical background, don't be afraid! We've distilled our knowledge and experience using SQL into a short course so that by the end, you'll have the raw skills to do some real data analysis for your company using SQL - a language virtually EVERY company uses. Note: this courses teaches you real-world SQL - not just the theory in abstract, but real skills you can use to get more data-driven in your current job. 

  How This Course is Structured: 

  • In this course we'll be pretending we're a real business (i.e. Blockbuster) so the stuff you learn will be easy to apply to your own situation/company.  No abstract/theoretical mumbo jumbo.

  • We'll go through queries a real business would run while also teaching you the raw skills undergirding those queries so you can adapt those skills to create custom queries for your own specific purposes

  • To reinforce learning, we have exercises and quizzes scattered throughout the course so you can learn by doing

  • We'll have a bonus section where new lectures will be added occasionally (including student-requested lectures, more advanced topics, strategies for getting unstuck, etc.)

  • We'll be actively involved in the discussion board answering any questions you might have! Don't be afraid to ask!

  A Note About Pedagogy: 

                  We know what it's like to buy a book, feel good about yourself, never finish it and have nothing to show for it.  We don't want that to happen with this course.  We want this to be a course you'll actually finish. We believe half of learning is motivation and engagement, so we've tried extra hard to make this course fun, relevant, entertaining, and punchy - no frills, no dragging things out, just the good stuff. Heck, you might even find yourself skipping a party to spend time with your new best friends (i.e. us)! 

  FAQs: 

  1. Do I need to purchase any software to take this course?    Nope! Everything we use to do data analysis with MySQL is completely free.  We'll walk you through the installation and set-up of any software we'll be using.

  2. Can I take this course with Linux? The set-up and installation lectures we've created are for Windows and Mac, and we don't currently have specific installation lectures for Linux.

  3. Is this about MySQL? Yes - we'll be using MySQL, but what you learn can be applied to pretty much all the variants of SQL (PostgreSQL, SQL Server, etc)


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Instructor Details

A Course You'll Actually Finish

This series is built upon the conviction that half of learning (ok, maybe 40%) is motivation and engagement.

This series aims to make each course engaging, not gargantuan in length, and just plain fun/ny (we’ll try at least). Plus, there will be quick wins throughout the course so you can visibly see yourself learning new skills able to applied in the real world.

In addition, we’ll hold contests every now and then (ooh~ prizes!) to motivate you to finish your course.

This is gonna be a course you’ll actually finish.

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Reviews

4.7

15,820 ratings on Udemy

Select a bar to show only those reviews.Select the bar again to show every rating.

By Frank du Mée on 3/3/2026

Certainly a match for me, I was looking for a playful way to start with SQL and this did match my expectations. At times it was difficult to follow the examples as the instructors jumped back and forth between MySQL/SQLPro and SQLSnack (which is a READ-ONLY environment), but that posed challenges that also forced me to think better about the exercises at hand. Will move on to more advanced courses now, specifically the ones that also show CREATE, DROP, database management etc. etc.

By Daniel Won on 11/24/2023

Very well taught course and enjoyed the brainteasers! I enjoyed the structure of it. Will reference this course moving forward if I need to refer back to any SQL materials. Moving forward, would like to see some new materials such as CASE (if/else), more formula related queries, etc... Thanks!

By Francisco J Gonzalez on 5/22/2019

Had no experience at all with SQL and see how useful it could be for me. Excellent course!!! You guys made it very clear in all the explanations given, for others with more experience might´ve different opinions. Something you to take away "answer" the questions made by the students even if those may be very simple.

By Olga Odell on 12/12/2018

I started this course knowing nothing about SQL. After three hours online I feel confident and comfortable writing queries and progressing with my new skill set. In this course Peter and David packed a ton of great content usable in every business environment. Thank you, guys!

By Renato Santos on 7/23/2017

Excellent, Relevant, Useful and Straightforward introduction and overview of SQL - I enjoyed the format and pace of the course. The Instructors provide a lot of great SQL material and present in an upbeat manner, with humor interspersed throughout. -- Highly Recommended

By Aditya Patil on 6/20/2017

Great course for understanding BASIC SQL. Loved the course, learnt alot, basic concepts definatly conquered but i only have one little issue. The course is way too basic. You understand completly what guys are teaching you but at the end I think this course needs little more course! Thanks guys, 4 sizzling stars, great work!

By Woody Burrows on 2/12/2017

This is a brilliant course for first time learners. The guys are engaging and dorkily funny. I have gone back to this course numerous times to refresh my knowledge. The only thing missing for me is coverage of subqueries and the different ways to achieve them e.g. in WHERE clause or using WITH. Other than than highly recommend.

By Kevin Kuipers on 7/4/2016

Great course, it has a good balance between terminology and actual examples. However, some things were not the clearest from why your pulling some information from some tables instead of others. Either way, it is great course to get familiar with SQL. I feel like I have a good foundation.

By Kamil Kolacek on 4/1/2016

Great introduction to SQL, the instructors were fun and quite knowledgeable. The course flowed well and it was pretty easy to follow along. The only suggestion I would have, is that the actual SQL code on whatever the instructors are doing should ALWAYS be up on the screen. That would make it easier to follow along. For instance have a left pane window where the SQL script is displayed and video on the right-hand side. Overall, great course! Thanks.

By Kathi.Tuers@Hotmail.Com on 9/6/2015

This is definitely the best SQL class I've taken so far! You'll set up MySQL and a text editor on your computer -- this, in itself, takes this class to a different level. I've mostly seen videos of people in sql programs or dealt with interactive websites but there's nothing quite like getting into the program. Very interesting and definitely not boring! These guys are great. And thanks to them, I'm interviewing for an entry-level data analyst job next week. The reason I give 4 stars is because the explanation of some concepts was a little confusing. That's nothing google can't remedy. Thanks, guys. You're awesome! Hopefully you come out with more.

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