How to learn SQL?

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Over the years many people have approached me to seek some guidance on “How to learn SQL?”. I have been pointing them to various online tutorials and emulators. Since this is a repetitive ask, I thought of creating a blogpost to keep it handy.

When it comes to SQL, or anything else for that matter, just the theory knowledge won’t help. You need to try out the queries on your own and practice them with a dummy database to understand the concepts. Here are the topics that one should practice.

Basics Concepts:
  • RDBMS Concepts
  • Datatypes
  • CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, and Delete, i.e. syntax for INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE queries)
  • DML, DDL Statements
  • Where clause


Intermediate Concepts:
  • Table Joins
  • Aggregate Functions & Having Clause
  • Views
  • Sub Queries
  • Triggers


Advanced Concepts:
  • Index
  • Functions
  • Stored Procedures
  • CTE (Common Table Expression)
  • Materialized Views
  • Query Optimization


If you have SQL Server Management Studio installed on your machine and want to tryout using a dummy database, then I would recommend using AdventureWorks DB from Microsoft. It comes pre-populated with data tables and table relationships.


Don’t worry if you don’t have access to any SQL Server instance. Nowadays a lot of websites are available with a SQL server connection. So all you have to do is just write queries and submit them on the page and you get the results instantly.

Here are some tutorial links:


LinkedIn Learning Course:


Solving Online Challenges


There are many more available online, however I found them stable and quite simple to use. You may use the tutorials of your wish, as long as you are doing some practice on your own on the above topics.

Those who prefer to have a personal touch in training and looking for a mentor, please feel free to drop me an email and we can workout on few online training sessions.

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