I think this course if poorly organized. The instructor is really trying to show us that the real life data sets and databases are messy, but providing only written instructions for me it proved useless. I, for one, need to see what other people are doing and not read long pages of horrible written explanations.

I paid for the course just to be able to do the exercises, which I also think it's a minus.

All in all it didn't "ENHANCE" my career prospects, mostly because nothing useful was taught here. Wouldn't recommend anyone to pay for it.

The Teradata platform (which is required to complete this course) is no longer working. DO NOT subscribe to this course anymore because you won't be able to finish it. Other than that, the classes I was able to complete using the Jupyter interface were great.

The fact that Teradata hasn't been available for students of this course yet it is still a hurdle to use is both unprofessional and unethical. This course should be taken down as it is impossible to pass and get credit without having access to Teradata

Nunca pude hacer los ejercicios porque mi Jupiter Notebook estaba vaciá y nadie me pudo ayudar

Half the course is not even accessible due to the lack of the Teradata data set

I found the first 4 weeks of the course amazing: just really well structured, thought-out, and delivered in a way that positions the student for success. Jana breaks the material down into digestible bits, gives you sufficient practice, and even if you don't get it, you can look at the answers to the practice questions and figure out where your thinking was incorrect.

The 5th week wasn't as well broken down, especially the last set of Teradata exercises. New concepts or ways of structuring queries were being introduced in those exercises, but there was no way to check for a correct solution if I couldn't come with one on my own (which was unfortunately half of the time). I still got a good grade on my last quiz, but I can't say that I really truly learned how to write the more complicated queries.

I would suggest that the last Teradata exercise set has more explanation or perhaps just answers that the student can refer to in order to understand why his/her line of thinking isn't working.

Otherwise, a truly fantastic course. I 100% recommend it.

Overall, great course!

I have approached other courses from other platforms and the upsides of this one here are many. The involvement of the teachers in this course is incredible in my opinion and they help a lot. The number of exercises also seems appropriate so overall the experience was great.

I definitely advise the instructors to suggest at least part of the answers to the practice exercises of week 5 (in Teradata). The gap between week 3 and 4 is a lot bigger than between week 2 and 3, of course, which is normal. Nevertheless, week 5 seems a bit like a detached exercise. I realize this must have been done for educational purposes but my instinct tells me that if I were provided with more indication I would have gone later to the discussion forums which I reckon would have been beneficial to my learning experience.

That was, in my opinion, a significant drawback but in general the course is so great I would not like to pull its rating back, so I leave 5*.

Thank you!

One of the most amazing MOOC courses I have ever taken. From the start, Jana did an excellent job with building the intuition of databases in general and of SQL. The modules (weeks) are organized coherently. The datasets were realistic and challenging (in a great way).

The best aspect of this course is the MySQL exercises, built upon IPython notebook. Personally I have experience with R and Python, yet I still feel like I learned a lot from the exercises. The instructions and lessons as part of the programming exercise were clear and useful, effectively complementing the video lectures and providing hands-on experiences.

The only pity I have is that Coursera stopped providing full access to course materials and Statement of Accomplishment. But that has nothing to do with this course. The instructors seem to provided maximal opportunity for all students, including ones (like me ) who are just 'auditing'.

Overall, a five star rating is a must for this course.

This was a great course. It became challenging enough at the end to really feel like an accomplishment when completing it. My only negative comment would be about having to setup teradata and reloading jupyters database connection every exercise, but after a few times it's not a huge problem.

The forum was very useful when you get stuck, with mentors replying reasonably quickly. All in all, I was happy with the course because I frequently caught myself knowing what I was solving for and how I could get the right answer(or something resembling it). There will be some highs and lows doing this course if like me you were very unfamiliar with SQL coming in to it, but the depth it goes it to means you'll come out feeling much more confident writing queries, once you are out the other side.

Excellent course. Quite hard, but practice labs and exercises make you learn a lot and prepare you very well. You can gain a lot of SQL knowledge starting from zero.

I also appreciated that the course is very practical: most of the theory is taught in practice labs, where you can apply it and learn by doing.

I'd like to add that I generally spent more time than indicated to complete the various weeks. This is not a negative point, but a note to let you consider that you might spend more time to complete the course as well.

This course definitely gave me confidence in mysql. Both beginners and novice learners can out try this course.Also we get to learn in 2 different platforms that is jupyter and terada using real world datasets . Overall best course for mysql i have found !

Excellent Course !!! This course is more on hands on practice rather than videos which is important to learn SQL. Highly recommended to take this course :). Thanks professor for this well designed course

It is a good course and I have learnt managing the data which I always felt curious to know .I was difficult for me to understand teradata at first because their is not a lot information about it

Great course! It takes you from zero knowledge of SQL to being able to write quite complicated queries, and being ready for most of standard SQL questions in job interviews. Strongly recommended!

Managing big data with MySQL helped me learn SQL. That was my primary goal. It was thus valuable and met my needs. My secondary (a close second) was to pick up some skills regarding MySQL, which is a specific and distinct relational database management system (distinct from, say, Microsoft's version or from PostgreSQL). On this front I was disappointed. The course is taught through other interfaces, such as Jupyter and Teradata, and neither offers nor requires any exposure to MySQL. I therefore think the course should be renamed Managing big data with SQL; that is, 'MySQL' should be removed from the name. It is, as it stands, misleading to folks like me interested in specifically getting some exposure to and familiarity with MySQL and the minor-league database administrative tricks that would come with that exposure. Thanks for the chance to comment.

I recognize the value of this course in terms of the real database it is using. Yet, I don't see this format intuitive for learning SQL. Good course for practicing SQL for experienced leaners, but not that friendly to beginners

too many issues with the DB's that needed to be accessed to complete the exams.

One extra star because Jana seems like she tried to make this easy to understand and useful. The practice exercises on Jupyter were easy to follow, but the practice exercises and the quizzes with Teradata were A LOT harder and I'm really not sure how we were supposed to be able to complete them with the information we learned in the practice exercises. It was like teaching us basic math and then giving us an algebra or calculus exam. Some of the exercise and quiz questions were written in such a way that it was impossible to understand what was being asked. As well, everything is from about 5 years ago, so a lot of the information within the course has changed but certain parts haven't been updated to reflect these changes (for example, in the final quiz for week 5 the answer key doesn't match: some of the questions have been changed or added). In general, I am very unsatisfied with this course and I would not recommend it to others.

The course design is excellent, but the issue of TERADATA needs to be fixed.

This was a frustrating class. Many of the concepts, especially simpler ones, were useful. But the instructions were gradually unclear and read like a first draft that nobody looked through afterwards. Jupyter, one of the interfaces, often didn't work, including the first time I tried to use it. The level of difficulty from week 4 to the final week was almost insurmountable. Please review this class. It would be a pity to leave it at the first-draft stage as it is now. My overall impression was that of course designers who didn't care about the time of their students, especially the hours of trying to make Jupyter work or deciphering poorly written instructions. This is all well-documented in the discussion forums for this class.

I wasn't able to complete the course, and as result the specialization because there was no way to access to the dataset required the course and no avenue for resolving the access issues which appeared to affect many learners in the course.

teradata is the most disgusting thing you can ever use

Jana Schaich Borg is an amazing instructor who not only tried to simplify the concepts in order for us to understand the tough material but who presented the course well in an adaptable logic to the different ways of individual learning.

Btw, whoever said that SQL can be learned in 1 week it is very likely NOT correct, as the majority of learners have a full time jobs and have never before worked with SQL. It literally took me about 5 years to become sort of an expert in Excel (note: I didn't say Guru:) as there is still a lot to learn); and as SQL is a totally different animal with it's own scripted language, it will most certainly take a while to understand and adapt to your own logic... so unless your day-to-day job involves writing very simple queries, the timeline to learn complex SQL queries should not be exaggerated.

I strongly recommend this course!

Firstly, This course gives listeners great opportunities to get access to the real world data and the skills to retrieve the data that can be used for analyzing.

Secondly, the design of this course is perfect, it includes almost all the necessary skills(queries, analyzing skills), resources(where you can find solutions when u come across problems) and tips for data analysis with sql.

Thirdly, the teacher(Jana) is good. She shows us the comprehensive aspects of data analysis with clear structure and step by step.

Therefore, it is good for beginners! One thing to mention is that if you are a beginner, you may need almost 18 hours every week under high efficiency especially for the last two weeks. Hence, it's good to make a balance !

Coming from other MOOC platforms, I thought I had some basic knowledge of SQL, but then it turned out to be fake sense of accomplishment. Here at Coursera, you are really learning the skill as a knowledge set in your brain, instead of copying someone's moves when they are wrtiting queries. Before finishing this course, I was able to run queries to solve some real problems I was facing when working with my teammates. Essentially it's a great course. The only suggestions I could make is 1. Improve the Jupyter server stability. Sometimes it took me nearly an hour to get into it. 2. Few questions in the exercises are not articulated properply, e.g W5E12, it's asking for the 'greatest' while the hint and the answer point to the 'minimum'.