SQL for Data Science on Coursera

Created by UC Davis Continuing and Professional Education and hosted on the Coursera platform, this online course consists of pre-recorded video lectures, auto-graded and peer-reviewed assignments and community discussion forums. This course is self-paced and designed to teach you a new skill in as little as 4-6 weeks.

As data collection has increased exponentially, so has the need for people skilled at using and interacting with data—in order to think critically and provide insights that enable better decision making in organizations. Data scientists are “part mathematician, part computer scientist and part trend spotter” and are in higher demand than ever before (SAS Institute, Inc.). Good data scientists must be able to retrieve and work with data, and to do that, you must be well versed in SQL, the standard language for communicating with database systems.

This course is designed to give you a primer in the fundamentals of SQL and working with data so you can begin analyzing it for data science purposes. You will begin to ask the right questions and come up with good answers to deliver valuable insights for your organization. This course starts with the basics and assumes you do not have any prior knowledge or skills in SQL. It will build on that foundation and gradually have you write both simple and complex queries to help you select data from tables.  You'll start to work with different types of data like strings and numbers and discuss methods to filter and pare down your results.

You will create new tables and be able to move data into them. You will learn common operators and how to combine the data. You will use case statements and concepts like data governance and profiling. You will discuss topics on data, and practice using real-world programming assignments. You’ll also interpret the structure, meaning and relationships in source data and use SQL as a professional to shape your data for targeted analysis purposes.

Although we do not have any specific prerequisites or software requirements to take this course, a simple text editor is recommended for the final project. So what are you waiting for? This is your first step in what could be a great new career.