Learn T-SQL With Erik: Course Introduction Material
Video Summary
In this video, I introduce my T-SQL course aimed at SQL developers, data scientists, engineers, and analysts looking to enhance their T-SQL skills or those who are just getting started. I walk through the setup process, including the need for SQL Server 2022 Developer Edition and the latest version of Management Studio, as well as how to download and use sample databases like Stack Overflow 2010 or 2013. Additionally, I provide a preview of some introductory material that covers common T-SQL conventions, basic commands, and data storage fundamentals, all designed to help learners get up to speed quickly. This introduction is just the beginning; stay tuned for more in-depth content starting with the basics of the `SELECT FROM WHERE` query structure.
Full Transcript
Erik Darling here with Darling Data, and we’re going to spend some time, you and I, where I’m going to be presenting small portions of the material from my T-SQL course here on YouTube. It is nowhere, going to be nowhere near the full breadth of material that you will find in the paid course, but it will be enough to hopefully lure you in. It will be hopefully a wiggly enough worm to lure you in to purchase it from me so that you can get the the full goodness from it. So of course, no learning experience is complete without a little bit of an introduction to talk about what course you’re taking. You know, like that. The course introduction slide. Beautiful. And of course introducing your instructor. So this is me. This is my very impressive resume. This is my MBA. This is just about a full encapsulation of all the details of my life, at least the important and pertinent ones to what we’re doing here, learning T-SQL together. This course is, of course, aimed at people who are trying to get into or who are practicing, but maybe not so meaningfully practicing their T-SQL skills. So if you’re a SQL developer, whether it is, you know, you’re developing, OLTP applications, or you are developing other types of things, you could be a data scientist, data engineer, data analyst, but it doesn’t matter because this course covers all sorts of query writing stuff. It doesn’t matter if it’s transactional or if it’s like reporting OLAP stuff.
I’m going to hit everything in here. So whatever your job title is, if you work with Microsoft SQL Server with T-SQL, this course is absolutely for you to learn from me. It’s amazing the way that works out, isn’t it? Something for everyone. The goals of the course are to teach you sound fundamentals, right? To make sure that all the little gaps and cracks and whatever you think you know are filled in. To advance your skillset meaningfully, really step you up so that when you’re writing queries or procedures or creating stuff, you do a real good job at it.
You know, you can make very informed choices as to the things, the structure of your database and your queries and everything else. And you will not be to blame when things go terrible. I’m also here to bust some very pervasive SQL myths because there are a lot of them floating around out there. Probably one of the biggest sources of SQL stupidity on the planet is LinkedIn, which is really just a playground for morons to post LLM nonsense in.
Granted, there are plenty of SQL bloggers out there who are incapable of an original thought that an LLM didn’t spit out for them. But we don’t need to pay too much attention to them, do we? Because we can recognize that and we know better than to traffic their websites. So this course, again, just to sort of recap a little bit, is going to be recording the content that will be presented at PASS.
Kendra and I are doing two days of T-SQL courses. So my goal is to have this entire thing cover the material presented there, plus all the stuff that was sort of on the cutting room floor. Right. Like, you know, two days of pre-cons, you’re looking at about six and a half hours of teach time each. This is going to be way more than that. So this is like all that stuff, plus a whole lot of other stuff that probably can’t fit in there.
The course up until it goes live will be available for two hundred and fifty dollars. And then it will go up to five hundred dollars once everything is said and done and complete. Videos will start dropping for this after May 10th.
I realize it says May 10th, but May 10th is Saturday. So it’s really after May 10th. I just ran out of room. So what I want to show you in this video is some of the starting material that like the from the overview material that you will you will get with the with the full course.
Starting off with some instructions about how to get to the sample data. Data and databases and the tools and things that you will need in order to run queries the way that I am showing you. So you will need SQL Server 2022 Developer Edition.
There is no harm in you getting 2022 Developer Edition and practicing there. Considering that SQL Server 2025 will probably be dropping sometime towards the end of this year, probably five, six months from now. It’s not a bad idea to get acquainted with the current newest version of SQL Server.
And of course, the latest version of Management Studio. I am right now using the SSMS 21 preview. That’s how I have this lovely dark mode.
But you don’t necessarily have to do that if you prefer a lighter mode of Management Studio. The demo databases that you can use for either of these are the Stack Overflow 2010 or 2013 database. They are you can download them from, of course, from these links.
The small version expands to about 10 gigs. The larger version expands to about 50 gigs. So depending on the size of your laptop or VM or wherever you’re going to be running these exercises and doing these practice things, that’s where you should do that. You should you should get a database that will fit reasonably into that hardware.
Now, to extract these, you will either want 7-zip or Windows 11 because Windows 11 can work with 7-zip zippy files or whatever. But 7-zip is very good at compacting things down. So that’s why 7-zip gets used here.
When you unzip everything, you will get four data files and one log file. It is not a backup file. So there’s no like restore database command. It is an attach database thing.
So you need to move your data and log files to whatever wherever your SQL Server is installed. And then you will use the attach database dialog to select the first MDF file and it will detect everything else that it needs to put in there. Along with the sort of get you set up instructions, there are a few other files that I thought would be useful to the folks looking at this because, you know, like me knowing T-SQL, I maybe make you or rather anyone who knows T-SQL may make a lot of assumptions about what other people know about T-SQL, but they might not actually know.
You might say some words, then they’re like, I know those are words, but I don’t know what they mean. So there is a file of what I consider to be common T-SQL conventions that I will refer to throughout the course. There will probably be a few things to get added in here once I get to some of the other stuff.
But for now, it covers logical query processing. It covers, you know, temporary tables, table variables, derived tables, just some basic syntax so that when you see query patterns, you understand. Exactly what they are.
And if I say some words that you don’t, you know, you don’t know the meaning of you can, you can refer to this file and you can find exactly what I’m talking about in here. So there is a very good sort of compendium of common terms and expressions and what they mean in here. There’s also some common T-SQL usage stuff that I thought would be useful.
So just sort of teaching like just some basic commands, mathematical operators, comparison operators, stuff like that. Common functions that you might use for things. So all sorts of good stuff in there.
Some newer functions when working with strings. So this stuff over here. And some information about how you can search. Some searching stuff, which is useful.
Some stuff when you’re talking about working with dates, right? All fun things to do in there. Aggregation functions and, of course, window functions as well. There is also this file here on data storage, which is just a rather brief overview of how data is stored in SQL Server.
So there’s kind of a lot of readie text in here for you to go over and absorb, assuming you need it. And then there’s an example database. I don’t use this database in the course of the training.
I just wanted to have a separate sort of set of commands that would show you common SQL commands like create database, use database, creating a schema and granting permissions, creating tables with different things in them, like different constraints and whatnot. And then, of course, how to like add constraints to tables and add indexes to tables. There are some filtered indexes in here.
There’s all sorts of like just basic command things to help you learn fundamentals of creating tables and indexes and whatnot in SQL Server. So there’s some fun stuff in here just to get people acquainted with SQL Server who are not, or rather T-SQL, who are not maybe completely familiar with it. So just, you know, very basic things to help sort of like serve as a reference if you run into anything you don’t understand or you want to learn how to do something that maybe you don’t know the command for off the top of your head.
So this is not meant to be a copy of like the full documentation for everything you can do in a database, just kind of the most common stuff that like you might have to do day to day and the most common terms and things that I’m going to be referring to during the course of me teaching you these things. So that’s the course intro material. Nothing too crazy in there, but I think it’s a pretty good starting place for folks who are completely unaware or rather like getting basic start starting material for T-SQL.
Anyway, that’s that. After this video, we’re going to do some teaser material from the actual like learning portion of it. And I think this is a pretty good starting place for most folks.
Even if you are pretty good with T-SQL, you can probably learn a thing or two from these as well. Anyway, thank you for watching. Hope you enjoyed yourselves.
I hope you learned something. And I will see you in the next video where we will talk about the very starting point of most of your queries, which is the old select from where combo. So we’ll get into that then.
All right. Thank you for watching.
Going Further
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