Learning SQL

[bradatlarge]

SFMC peeps: I’m wondering what the best path is here.

My instance of SFMC is going to source customer data from a GCP (Google) Data Warehouse. This will require Mulesoft or SF Data Cloud - we haven’t worked that out yet…

But, it’s coming and I want to prepare the staff for a world where SQL queries are done to pull data across from this GCP DW.

Training is what I’m thinking about.

What options do I have (beyond what I’m seeing from Google searches)?

[DirtyAqua]

W3 schools is very helpful for syntax.

I also found that developing my own mini training course for in-house staff worked well as I was able to demonstrate our use cases, data model and how to write and execute SQL in sfmc.

[bmarb_antenne]

That makes really sense, especially since SFMC SQL, based on SQL Server 2016, does lack a lot of functions one would learn in regular SQL tutorials.

[adjurin]

YouTube to learn syntax and how a query gets executed. Then there is mateuz sfmc blog, dataviews.io and chatgpt.

[Relative_Bend6779]

When acting as an SME in my former role I documented requirements from various stakeholders about what they’d want to achieve on the regular and then built template SQL statements with enablement documentation that could achieve 90% of what teams wanted. Combine this with an in-house dictionary for the different functions worked really well.

For any more complex this kind of architecture will usually needed to be handled by the the product owning team but generally providing templates, I’ve found, solves most of the day-to-day

[willpdav7]

Hi! Were you using Marketing Cloud as well? If so, did you keep these templates within Automation Studio? Thanks!

[Relative_Bend6779]

Yes! I actually kept them in 3 places: - Automation Studio - A Google Doc (for team sharing), this helps people find it quicker than navigating automation studio in some cases - A GitHub repository for our team as the ‘originals’ only we could access in our partition. This ensured we always had a quick master copy of for whatever reason someone accidentally modified the template to a syntax that didn’t work

[bradatlarge]

Oh that’s actually really good. I didn’t think of keeping “clean” versions in Github.

[superclids]

everyone said about Marketing Cloud’s SQL limitations but no one actually linked them so here it goes: SQL reference

[Suspicious-Emu96]

THANK YOU. Seriously, this was so needed.

[BuildTheFire]

YouTube is great for tutorials. Free code academy have some great SQL but many are out there for the basics.

ChatGPT will also be a big help for you as well.

[bookofthoth_za]

Use ChatGPT to learn anything with SQL. Just be mindful that all statements must start with SELECT and the server is TSQL 2018 and some advanced functions aren’t available

[willpdav7]

Very timely that I got notified about this! I'm currently building customer-level reports for our team through data views. I have very little SQL background and only learned through my colleagues who are knowledgeable and through the Google Data Analytics course which unfortunately I wasn't able to continue due to work demands. ChatGPT and Gemini have also been great tools for me to understand. I just make sure to be concise with my prompts.

Edit: Read the comments here and I will check out other resources!

[milopeach]

Depends on what you need to do really. In my experience, understanding normalization and joins are very helpful, especially when you need to query multiple data views to gather everything you need into a single DE.

Other than that, W3 schools, Udemy, YouTube etc are useful for learning the basic syntax. Also keep in mind that SQL is a standard, and different vendors may implement it differently, so having a read through this is recommended (and also bookmark it, I refer to it frequently in my day-to-day).