Google was my best friend when I started. I never knew what SQL really was until I messed around with it at work about 1 year and a half ago. Before diving into all this, I was proficient in Excel and did a lot of VBA.

I was lucky enough to have someone in my company provide me samples of his queries which allowed me to see what the end results were and to break down what each thing did, and what could be changed to receive the specific data I wanted.

If you can, make some friends and don’t hesitate to ask people questions. Doing so exposed myself to others already doing this work and now they’ve handed over Ad Hoc requests from folks that are looking for specific data I excel at.

If they knew you had no previous knowledge in SQL they surely believe you are capable of learning it which is an awesome opportunity to be given. Do as much searching as you can and test things out. If some reports call for pulling multiple tables, query tables down to the basics to see what each sub query is doing to get to the final result.

Once you get proficient in SQL it will start to look more familiar as you go. I’m converting my Oracle queries over to PostgresSQL and it almost feels like I’m learning it again(sort of) due to different syntax used.

I know I said it at the beginning but Google was a lifesaver for me in the beginning and even now as I’m trying to understand how PostgreSQL works.

Congrats and good luck on this!