Advanced Certificate in SQL

Ten modules, 87 lessons and about 29 hours of video. Every lesson carries a written summary, notes and a key-takeaways panel, and 49 of them carry an interactive step. There are ten checkpoints of eight questions and a final assessment of twenty questions at 80 per cent, which is what issues the certificate. The last two modules are problems stated in words for you to solve before the answer is worked through.

You should be comfortable with SELECT, WHERE, joins and GROUP BY. If those feel routine, you're ready. If not, our Certificate in SQL gets you there, and the Advanced SQL Bundle includes both courses.

The ideas carry straight over: joins, subqueries, views, window functions and transactions work everywhere. The course is taught in SQL Server, so some of the syntax is Microsoft's T-SQL, such as bracket wildcards, CONVERT and its style codes, the stored procedure and cursor syntax, and the plus sign for joining strings. The notes flag each one as it comes up.

The SQL that does the heavy lifting at work: every join type, grouping with HAVING, text and date functions, indexes and schema design, stored procedures and functions, temporary tables, cursors and transactions, triggers, views and subqueries, and window functions that rank rows and compare each one to the last. Common table expressions, PARTITION BY, running totals and execution plans sit just beyond it, and the notes point you to each as the next step.

No. SQL Server's free Developer or Express edition and SQL Server Management Studio cost nothing. Management Studio runs on Windows only and every demonstration uses it, so a Windows PC is the easy route.

Advanced SQL if you want to write the queries behind the reports. Power BI if you want to build the reports people click through. The two work well together, and strong SQL makes Power BI easier.

You build it. Module 1 has you create your own practice table, with text, decimals, dates and a foreign key, and the practice problems run against tables you've built. If your rows differ from the ones on screen, that's fine, as long as you understand why.

Yes. Pass the twenty-question final assessment at 80 per cent and you earn the Advanced Certificate in SQL, an OBA certificate of completion that an employer can verify online. It isn't a Microsoft certification, and the course isn't exam prep for one.

Download the free info pack first. It walks you through every module, what you'll build and what you need before you start, so you can enrol knowing exactly what you're getting. If you'd like to talk it through, get in touch and we'll help you choose.