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The resources available here are in a few different formats. There are Blog articles and supporting videos that will be created in a theme as outlined in the ‘course’ below. You can use the Course breakdown to see the other topics that might be of interest to you. There are also presentations that I have given over the years listed here for downloads if you like.

You should ideally have the basics of SQL under your belt before starting on these tips and tricks. I won’t be covering the very basics because there are a number of excellent beginner tutorials out there. A quick web search should set you up with more than you can shake a stick at. My goal here is to bring you from that basic understanding to functional.

Blog

Along with (post COVID) travel and ponderings, the blog will be my way to episodically cover the topics that I consider important to good reporting analytics.

Course

Browse the course outline below. As I cover material in Blog or Video format. I’ll link those resources.

Presentations

Here is a partial archive of some of the presentations I have given over the years. I’ll add more as I have time. Be grateful that I will probably be skipping Ingres DBA and Oracle 8 DBA courses hahaha…

Beyond SQL 101

Lesson 1: Planning Your Query

Best practices for moving from a report request to a solid technical specification.

Lesson 2: SELECT and FROM Clause

  • How to retrieve Static values
  • Calculations in the Select Clause
  • How to retrieve Table Columns
  • FROM Clause for a single table

Lesson 3: WHERE Clause

  • Static joins using the WHERE clause.
  • Table Joins (Inner, and outer).
  • How to use Multiple tables in the FROM clause

Lesson 4: Aggregates! GROUP BY Clause, functions and the HAVING Clause

  • Use of GROUP BY clause to create counts.
  • Other basic aggregate functions.

Lesson 5: ORDER BY Clause

  • Different uses of ORDER BY
  • Methods of reference

Lesson 6: Functions, Conditional Functions, and Formatting Functions

  • General functions
  • Conditional functions (NVL,NVL2,Case)
  • Formatting Functions (UPPER, TO_CHAR, NUMBER, LPAD, RPAD, TRIM, DATE, etc)

Lesson 7: Basic Tuning, Keys, and Indexes

  • What constraints are
  • What a Primary Key is
  • What indexes are
  • How to use indexes
  • How to create indexes.