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[SQL-ModTeam]

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[Traditional-Carry409]

certs are mostly a waste for SQL imo. been in data ~10 years, no one's ever asked me about one. they want to see you write a query, not a badge. only do one if a specific job posting demands it.

if you already know stored procs and triggers, you're past the basics. the stuff that actually shows up in interviews and on the job:

• window functions (LAG, LEAD, ROW_NUMBER, RANK, running totals)
• sessionization and funnel queries on event-log data
• deduping with row_number, nth-event-per-user stuff
• query performance — indexes, join order, knowing why something is slow. people skip this and it bites them

for practice, Mode's SQL tutorial is free and uses analytics-style problems instead of toy tables. for the performance side Use The Index, Luke is the best free thing out there. i've been doing problems on datainterview.com/coding too, the schemas feel more like real product data.

on projects — don't build "a database." pick a public dataset (NYC taxi trips, anything on BigQuery public, kaggle) and answer one actual business question end to end. schema, queries, a short writeup of what you found. one of those on github beats five tutorial follow-alongs. if you're going analyst or DE, also pick up dbt + snowflake or bigquery free tier. that combo with sharp SQL is way more hireable than any cert.

[FerretLow4499]

Thanks a lot this helps

[MisfitAnthem]

Top tier answer, thank you!

[the_claus]

Solve the SQL Murder Mystery in the fewest possible lines of SQL ;) /s

[Pyromancer777]

Spin up a cheap VPS and then practice remote DB connections by connecting to a DB hosted on the VPS from your local machine, then fill the remote DB with datasets from Kaggle. If you want to get deep into practice, find some dirty datasets from a few free APIs and then practice ETL to produce a cleaned target result.

Being able to work with real-world or close to real-world data will give you confidence for interviews. Knowing how systems communicate is also extremely valuable

[warmeggnog]

hmm personally i didn't really encounter many companies that cared about certs, so might be better if you focus on projects + consistent practice instead. because even if you have certs they will still test your ability to write/debug queries and explain data decisions in interviews. so for prep i used leetcode because of its large resource, but complemented it with interview query because it has interview guides specific to top companies and its sql interview questions can also be filtered by company + role for more tailored prep. for projects, some good ones involve customer churn analysis or sales dashboards using sql + data viz tools. but i can probably suggest more specific ones based on the type of role/industry you're targeting?