SQL Learning Roadmap

Progress tracker for learning SQL from beginner to advanced.

Progress: 6/31 topics (0%)

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Phase 1 — SQL Foundations

• What is a database & SQL? — RDBMS concepts, tables, rows, columns, relations
• Basic SELECT — SELECT *, SELECT columns, FROM, alias AS
• WHERE & filtering data — =, !=, >, <, BETWEEN, IN, IS NULL
• ORDER BY & LIMIT — Sorting ASC/DESC, limiting results
• SQL data types — INT, VARCHAR, TEXT, DATE, BOOLEAN, FLOAT
• INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE — Basic data manipulation (DML)
• CREATE & DROP TABLE — Creating and deleting tables (DDL basics)

Phase 2 — Intermediate Queries

• LIKE & wildcards (%_) — Pattern-based text search
• Aggregate functions — COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX
• GROUP BY — Grouping data for aggregation
• HAVING — Filtering GROUP BY results
• INNER JOIN — Combine tables — matching rows only
• LEFT JOIN & RIGHT JOIN — Combine tables including non-matching rows
• FULL OUTER JOIN — All rows from both tables
• Basic subqueries — Query inside a query (WHERE / FROM)
• UNION & UNION ALL — Merging results from two queries

Phase 3 — Database Design

• Primary Key & Foreign Key — Unique identity and table relationships
• Normalization 1NF — No repeating columns, atomic values
• Normalization 2NF — No partial dependency
• Normalization 3NF — No transitive dependency
• ER Diagram — Visually mapping entity relationships
• Constraints — NOT NULL, UNIQUE, CHECK, DEFAULT
• Indexes — Speeding up queries with indexing

Phase 4 — Advanced SQL

• Window functions — ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK, PARTITION BY
• CTE (WITH ... AS) — Common Table Expressions for complex queries
• CASE WHEN — Conditional logic inside queries
• Advanced subqueries (EXISTS, ANY, ALL) — Correlated subqueries and set comparisons
• Stored procedures & functions — Reusable saved SQL blocks
• Transactions & ROLLBACK — COMMIT, ROLLBACK, ACID properties
• Views — Saved queries as virtual tables
• Query optimization — EXPLAIN PLAN, avoiding N+1, performance tips

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Tools: MySQL / PostgreSQL / SQLite