Learn SQL online for free with these 10 courses for beginners

SQL is perhaps the most important skill to learn as you are working in tech. It’s the most universal and common used database language, it’s highly sought after by the hiring employers. It’s not that hard to pick up but you can earn good money.

Although most of them also have their own additional proprietary extensions that are usually only used on their system, but in overall, they share the same standard syntax for the commonly used queries such as SELECT, ALTER, INSERT, etc. So, if you know the standard syntax SQL, it’s good to go.

Time to learn SQL

Here are some useful resources to learn SQL online for free:

Codecademy: An online interactive platform offering 12 programming courses, including learning SQL. You can be able to use it for free. While using Codecademy, you can able to regurgitate syntax, learn and practice with 4 projects - how to manipulate data and build queries that communicate with more than one table.
w3schools.com: W3Schools is a famous website for learning web technologies online. It offers a SQL tutorial teaching you how to use SQL in: MySQL, SQL Server, MS Access, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Postgres, and other database systems. There’s an online SQL editor, you can edit the SQL statements, and click on a button to view the result.
SQLBolt: SQLBolt provides a set of interactive lessons and exercises to help you learn SQL. This interactive tutorial introduces you to the basics of SQL, including querying, updating, inserting, and deleting data.
Datacamp: This course Intro to SQL for Data Science teaches you everything you need to know to begin working with a database, from selecting columns, filtering rows, Aggregate Functions to Sorting, grouping and joins.
Data Science and Cognitive Computing Courses: Cognitive Class (formerly Big Data University) is an IBM initiative to spread big data literacy by providing free access to online courses covering practical skills for working with data. The courses follow the “learn any time” delivery model with no time restrictions to complete them. This is not really about SQL specifically, but it’s also good for anyone interested in Data Science and Data Engineering
Introduction to Structured Query Language (SQL) - Coursera: In this course created by University of Michigan, you’ll walk through installation steps for installing a text editor, installing MAMP or XAMPP (or equivalent) and creating a MySql Database. You’ll learn about single table queries and the basic syntax of the SQL language, as well as database design with multiple tables, foreign keys, and the JOIN operation. Lastly, you’ll learn to model many-to-many relationships like those needed to represent users, roles, and courses.
SQL for Data Science - Coursera: This course is designed to give you a primer in the fundamentals of SQL and working with data so that 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 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.
Data Science Essentials - EdX: In this data science course, you will learn key concepts in data acquisition, preparation, exploration, and visualization taught alongside practical application-oriented examples such as how to build a cloud data science solution using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning platform, or with R, and Python on Azure stack.
The SQL Tutorial - Modeanalytics: In particular, this tutorial is meant for aspiring analysts who have used Excel a little bit but have no coding experience. Though some of the lessons may be useful for software developers using SQL in their applications, this tutorial doesn’t cover how to set up SQL databases or how to use them in software applications—it is not a comprehensive resource for aspiring software developers.
Intro to SQL: Querying and managing data - Khanacademy: Learn how to use SQL to store, query, and manipulate data. SQL is a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data in a relational database and is used by a huge number of apps and organizations.

Need a good tool for learning and practising SQL? Try TablePlus.

It’s modern, native tool with elegant GUI that allows you to simultaneously manage multiple databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server and more.  It’s free anyway.