StarDestroyer.Net BBS

My new years resolution that I made this evening is that I am going to expand my IT skill set away from purely technical (fixing broken PC's and networks and servers) and into database support as well.

More specifically SQL databases.

As I stand I know fuck all about SQL.

I work for a training company who will offer me free training as per terms of employment which I intend to take full advantage of, however all of these types of courses assume a pre-level of knowledge (i.e working experience) although my eventual aim is to get accredited.

Therefore, I need to learn the basics first.

Anyone done this recently enough to have any recommendations for some excellent resources for the SQL n00b?

Cheers.

The Database Systems book by Connolly and Begg seemed an excellent textbook when I was at university. I'm not a database guy, though, so there may be better out there from a practical standpoint.

Yeah, SQL itself isn't that hard to learn (although you can have needs for particularly hard queries, but you still only end up using a combination of a select few commands most of the time, usually SELECT, FROM, INNER JOIN, WHERE, and ORDER BY)

The hardest thing to learn are the rules of normal form (no duplicate data, creating look-up tables, primary and foreign key rules, ect) and creating an efficient database that has all the data you need.

Even if you don't actually create databases, knowing how to create SQL queries to lookup or edit data is a very useful skill to have.

I did learn about normal form but haven't ever had a need to create a database so I've forgotten the specifics of the rules of normal form - but I write and use queries almost daily, mostly simple stuff, but I've done some fairly complicated stuff too.

The nice thing about knowing SQL is that if it exists in the data, you can write a query that will give you want you want. (Example: Say you have orders in a database and you need to see all the orders that person A has made, but that person B has not; you can write a query to display just that data.)

Well I've gone out and bought some text books on using sql as a querying tool so hopefully these will get me going, I'm not that interested in becoming a programmer. I work in support and would prefer to stay in support, just with a broader skill set