Fast SQL learning tips (2024)

SQL which stands for Structured Query Language is a very important domain-specific language used in programming and in managing data in relational database management systems (RDBMS). SQL is very important in many aspects, especially in structured data where the user writes specific commands to find the relation between different variables and quantities.

SQL was initially developed by the IBM researchers Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce in the early ‘70 and it was designed for the purpose to retrieve and manipulate stored data in the IBM’s quasi relational database System R. Since then SQL has been the most used database language and it became a standard of ASI in 1986 and ISO in 1987.

One of the main purposes of SQL is to query data in a relational database. SQL has a standard language syntax defined and maintained by ISO/IEC SC 32 but other modifications exist as well. This makes SQL not completely portable among different database systems without adjustments. Other extensions of SQL include adaptations to procedural and object-oriented programming via DBMS integration with other languages such as Java, Python, Perl, etc.

In this article, I discuss some useful SQL learning tips that will help you accelerate your SQL learning. These tips are subjective and not exhaustive since SQL is a very extended language. This article is intended for those people that plan to learn SQL but also for those people that are learning SQL. Here I assume that the reader has an SQL editor or editor platform that can write SQL commands and statements to perform queries.

SQL has several language elements that can be dived into different categories. Some of these categories include:

1. Queries: are used in SQL to retrieve data in a database by using specific criteria.
2. Clauses: are important SQL constituents of queries and statements.
3. Expressions: are important parts of SQL that are used to produce scalar values or tables composed of columns and rows.
4. Keywords: are constituent parts of statements, queries, and expressions in SQL. They are defined words that are either reserved or non-reserved.
5. Predicates: are SQL constituents of…