100 Days Of Learning - Day 4

Hello everyone, I'm back for Day 4. I'm happy to report I figured out how to add my posts to a series here on DEV (pro tip: you can still add jekyll front matter even if you are using the rich text editor themoreyouknow.jpg).

Today I tackled something different, I've been asked to level up my SQL skills at work (I'm a business analyst, and while I don't get into the DBs on our projects often, it occasionally comes up).

Fortunately, my company provides me with a Pluralsight account, so I'm working my way through a course (link below) to get a better understanding beyond my current level of "basic queries that I copy-pasted from my devs and then made simple modifications to in order to get to the data I'm looking for". The goal is to be able to start from scratch and draft my own queries. Later I want to get a deeper understanding of how the DBs are structured in some of my main projects.

My Learning Goals for today:

• Install SQL Server 19 on my machine
• Work through 1 hour of the 2 hour course Querying Data with T-SQL from SQL Server

What I Completed:

• Installed SQL Server 19 and completed about 50 minutes of video material

What I Learned:

Where to begin! I really wish I had found this course sooner. I have read online tutorials and taken an Udemy course on MySQL before, and I had the general concepts around SQL queries down, but I didn't have any true understanding of what was happening.

This course covered how to navigate SSMS, the statement execution order, and a very basic overview of joins. What was especially helpful for understanding joins is 1) how the execution order impacts what is returned and 2) actually going into set theory. Maybe I'll make another post diving deeper into what made this click for me.

My Goals for Next Time:

• Finish this course
• Get back to my Survey Form project from yesterday (this might turn into a weekend project instead, we'll see)

Thanks for joining me on this journey. If you're doing your own #100daysofcode or if there are any other SQL resources you recommend, please share below! I'd love to hear about what you're learning.

Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash