AL
Aug 22, 2020
A comprehensive course that covers major aspects of query building and retrieval in a management system. The topics were delivered well and the materials/assignments were relevant for skill-building.
KF
Apr 2, 2023
I loved the practices. I learned alot But I think some of them had mistakes... The online visual studio code never worked for me! It might be good to make a video that explains how to work with it.
By Maciej M
•Jan 5, 2023
Rather slow-paced and not maintained anymore. You learn only absolute minimum. There is no good practice hints etc.
By Christos A
•Apr 23, 2020
Not satisfied. There are better MOOCs for SQL/Data Science out there. I wouldn't recommend it for a SQL beginner.
By Terrela P
•Sep 16, 2021
Great information, however, the site that host the datebase for the quizes is outdated and no longer supported.
By Bram M
•Mar 9, 2021
The course is good in itself, but answers circulate on the internet, making the certificate not very meaningful.
By Naomy A R
•Dec 16, 2019
there is a lot of questions about how the questions were asked, i highly recommend you do see the discussions
By Neeli K
•Mar 3, 2020
Not enough examples were shared.
Certain concepts were explained without telling their underlying basics.
By Bogdan O
•Jul 6, 2022
Way too theoretical and almost no practice. This course is the same as reading some slides.
By Rohan D
•Jan 22, 2023
Could have improved on giving some example questions along with already sufficient theory.
By Eslam R
•Nov 3, 2018
There are few examples about every lesson, and may not have examples for some lessons
By ratan G
•Oct 29, 2022
instructor should do code in parallel there is just story telling
By Benjamin B
•Aug 1, 2022
Did not have practices, just video then straight to the test.
By Kerry-Ann K
•May 13, 2022
Not information was given and it is clearly out of date.
By Jacopo F
•May 31, 2024
The first course is good, the second is a real mess
By Alexander A W
•Jul 7, 2023
Dont recommend it for beginners
By Billy S
•Jul 29, 2019
The presentation and speaker
By Adriana R
•Apr 11, 2020
Not the best for beginners
By Inês M D C
•Apr 22, 2020
Didn't like the teacher.
By Ahmed E
•Dec 17, 2020
Not enough Examples
By qizhou c
•Feb 22, 2020
Too hard
By Brian M
•May 25, 2021
Average
By Javier
•May 31, 2023
It’s not a course of SQL for Data Science as it skips advanced SQL features like triggers or window functions and focus on the basics. I don't know if the other courses in the specialization go more in depth, but this first one only covers the basics of using SQL.
The course is for the most part composed by videos in which the instructor explains a certain topic with slides and provides some examples of already written queries. This is a teaching method I’ve seen in other courses in this platform and I think is one of the worst ways to teach a subject like programming in which the best way a person can learn about it is by practice and more practice. It’s not like the theory isn’t important; it is and if you’re new to a subject, you may need some introductory lessons, but after that, a course needs to keep engaging students and encourage them to practice in every possible manner what they’ve learnt. This course focuses heavily on theory, with little practice to do. Also, this practice is far more difficult in some cases than the explanations shown in the videos.
Scripts for videos are written in a poor manner, and at times it’s evident the instructor is reading a prompter. She is a knowledgeable person but it seems that is hindered by the script she needs to read and that leads to some misspellings and confusing explanations.
The peer-graded assignment is confusing as well because there is an environment for VS Code which doesn’t need to be used in the assignment. I don’t know why is still there if it doesn’t have a function. Also, to answer and write the queries for the assignment, you will need to search in Google or Stack Overflow because, again, the difficulty level is far greater than the explanations provided in the videos.
Breaking down the course, my rating would be:
Instructor: 2/5
Lessons & Materials: 1/5
Learning by doing: 1/5
Virtual Environment: 1/5
Conclusion: Take the course at your own risk, there is much better material online.
By Raymond Z
•Jun 13, 2022
There are so many issues with this course. The lectures, while generally clear, are obviously read from a teleprompter, with no slides or real exercises provided. They lack a lot of substance and examples to fully illustrate the content, and have no interactive components. The instructor is clearly extremely capable and knowledgeable, but is unable to convey any of that information due to the structure of the lectures.
The assignments meanwhile are way too difficult compared to the lecture material and severely lacking in feedback, explanation, or clarity. Half of the questions either have blatant errors, confusing wording, or requirements impossible for SQLite. Maybe this was partially my error, but it's not like the course was very helpful. In one of the lectures, on using DATE, the example in the lecture is formatted incorrectly, leading to a lot of trouble when doing the Quiz.
Some questions will ask you about "correlation" or "predicting", which is fine and all, except for the part where SQLite doesn't support many of the fuctions neccessary for such analysis.
I cannot recommend anyone take this course. There are maybe 4 hours of actual content in the entire course (including quizzes and assingments), except it'll take you significantly longer to complete as you sit there confused by the questions. Yes, you'll learn something, but you also could've done the same with a free tutorial somewhere else.
The forums are filled with people confused by the formatting, phrasing, or structure of assessments. Meanwhile, no effort is made by the instructors or UC Davis to correct the many issues here nor answer any of these posts. It's frankly an embarassment for a school like UC Davis to be putting out such low-quality content, even if it is from their extension program.
By James P
•Apr 19, 2025
This is NOT a beginner friendly class. Everything up until the Final Project was presented adequately. The instruction was not great and required a lot of additional time going on YouTube and searching the internet for better explanations. The Final Project was a horrible mess. Several new software applications are suddenly introduced that are needed to complete the project. There is very poor instruction on how to set up these applications and pull in the databases necessary. Mostly, the instructions just reference outside internet sites and YouTube videos. If this is going to be used for completing work, they really should have provided additional videos explaining how to set up and use all of the software. If I had known this from the start, I would have never enrolled in the this course.
By Heiko K
•Feb 25, 2020
The course is overall very high in quality and I found it really useful. The teacher explains the concepts really well and the exercises are very good. I really found joy doing the final course assignment. However, I feel that I got tricked into paying one more month of subscription, seconds after I paid for another month, I did receive the course certificate. I submitted the peer graded assignment one week ago. My plan was to continue with the other courses in this specialisation but after my experience with this subscription/payment philosophy, I will not discontinue and look for other online platforms with a better customer experience for me. Thank you nonetheless for the high quality of this course, I am certain many learners find the material extremely helpful, as did I.
By Scott F
•Feb 20, 2024
I did not care for the presenter, Sadie. She needs to work on her presentation skills. Additionally it seemed that some of the slides had errors. I didn't keep track but I remember thinking it was an issue. The class needed a way to practice along with the lessons. I ended up buying a book to learn sql that, luckily, was excellent. I also felt that the Yelp dataset was very difficult to use. It would have been nice if it had been accompanied by some description. I felt like I knew what I was doing (and I did) before I started working with it but it was very frustrating to work with the yelp dataset. I would not recommend this class which is a shame as I really liked the Python for Everybody class and python is much more complicated than sql.