1 Intro

It will be important to be comfortable with basic SQL for this course, as we will be using it to extract data from the De-identified Data Warehouse. While there are many SQL commands, for this course we will primarily be relying on the SELECT command, which reads data from the database.

To get up to speed, I have put together a few resources for review as part of the first lecture and to bookmark for future reference. There are a lot of resources, such as walkthroughs, free online courses, and youtube videos. My recommendations below are based on core needs for this course.

1.1 General Resources

  • W3Schools.com: This site has tutorials and handy references for commands in many programming languages. The SQL section is here: W3schools SQL. I’m often looking things up here as I work through projects
  • StackOverflow.com: Any question or problem you’ve had? Someone else has already probably had that same issue, and their questions and community answers can be searched here. You’ll notice that if you search Google for any programming related question, the first results are often from Stack Overflow. I use this site constantly for any programming related issue (SQL, R, Stata, whatever). When searching, you can limit your results to a specific programming language by putting it in square brackets, like this: “[sql] join tables”

1.2 SQL for Non-Programmers Course

At UCSF, we have free access to Linkedin Learning, which has thousands of courses across all disciplines, from programming to design to leadership. To get free access, you have to connect your UCSF account to your LinkedIn account (instructions here).

Once your accounts are linked, you can search for SQL and find thousands of courses, from 10 minutes to 10 hours. I recommend reviewing the SQL for Non-Programmers course, which is 90 minutes. It is broken up into 1-2 minute sections, so you can skip around based on your current level of comfort.

1.3 Temporary Tables

Later in the course, you may need to store data into a temporary table in the database. To understand temporary tables and how to best use them, you can review the following resources