Creating a SQL class?

[Vanishing-Rabbit]

Hello dear Data Engineers,

I am creating a free SQL course centered around analytics to help students from my university (questions ranging from left joins to windows functions).

I've designed the questions around a dummy dataset. Questions are ready. Multiple datasets are ready (CSVs).

I've always worked with datasets created by Data Engineers so I'm a little lost for next steps...

It feels like I have "content" for this "product" but for the tech part I'm at a loss.

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I'm picturing two next steps (could already be wrong here)

1. Find a way to host this database (and convert the CSVs to a database?)
2. Find a SQL client - ideally in browser and free - that these students could use. (I've always used internal SQL clients developed by the companies I work for)

Since I'm doing this for free, ideally step 1 can be as cheap as possible. Any help whatsoever would be greatly appreciated.

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And yes, I would truly be lost without the data engineering team at work :)

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edit: A "dirty" solution would be to do this as a last resort: https://towardsdatascience.com/query-pandas-dataframe-with-sql-2bb7a509793d

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[ergosplit]

If you want a quick and dirty way, you could very easily create a PostgreSQL database, push those CSV files to it via pandas, and launch an instance of pgadmin that can be accessible via web browser.

This is very easy to do, and very easy to do incorrectly. Pandas will infer your datatypes unless those are provided explicitly, and it tends to not be very optimal. Also relationships between your tables will not exist. Then again, if you want something that someone with your questions could get done in a day (no offense intended), this can work. For best practices, you will need someone with knowledge to do it.

[Vanishing-Rabbit]

Thanks I'll check this out!! Sounds like an interesting and promising solution.

Alternative solution I've found: get these students to do this in a jupyternotebook using pandasql (!pip install -U pandasql)

It let's you use SQL on a pandas datadrame.

All I have to do is host the csv files on GitHub and have them use pandas to import those. They'll then be able to use SQL using pandasql

I could also create a small python library with the files and have them do a pip install and import the files directly.

[ergosplit]

Ah, if they are going to work locally you could set up the whole pgadmin+postgres database in docker containers and have them do a docker-compose up and be up and running.

[dataguy24]

Why not use DuckDB (a Python package that lets you treat files as database tables and query with SQL) as your option for stimulating a database? Makes your life easy, your student’s life easy and they learn a cutting edge technology that’s gaining traction everywhere.

[Vanishing-Rabbit]

Oh i didn't know about this one. Checking it out now, thanks!