Welcome

In the world of relational database management systems, Structured Query Language (SQL) is the language used to create data repositories; insert, update, and delete data in those repositories; as well as to as to ask questions about (or "query") those data. Even for non-relational database management systems (often called NoSQL databases), many have query languages based on SQL. Simply put, learning SQL will give you the ability to manipulate and query data in a way that is unparalleled by learning any other language—nothing else even comes close.

This book is designed to help you become proficient at manipulating data using SQL in modern systems. Depending on your preference, we’ll teach you to write SQL from the ground up or to write it in collaboration with generative artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT or Bard.

We’ll also give you the ability to practice what you are learning in a variety of database management systems, including the following:

The philosophy behind this book is to provide as much as possible at no charge to the user, so access to all the instructional content is free. We have integrated with database systems that have generous free-tier offerings in the cloud to minimize setup requirements for you to get going. We even have a way for professors to collect student work for grading as part of our free offering.

Currently, this book is a bit rough around the edges. It is a work in progress so we don’t yet have all the chapters written yet and we have not gone through a serious editing process so there are bound to be typographical errors as well as some content areas where we could do a better job better explaining. If you are inclined to provide feedback, you can do so on our book feedback survey.

This book is designed for use in conjunction with collegiate courses that deal with data manipulation. Because some of the author team are university professors and require their students to use this book, we are concerned about the learning experience. Accordingly, we are offering the instructional content without advertisement. Ultimately, we’ll fund the continued hosting, upkeep, and development of this resource by charging for use of our automatic grading features but even those are free for now.

So go ahead and get started, we hope you enjoy learning SQL and that you will do great things in your career with your data skills.

Sincerely, the author team:

Elijah Allen
Gove Allen
Kandin Allen
Nicholas Ball