PostgreSQL Exercises | Hacker News Reader

PostgreSQL Exercises

pgexercises.com

167 pointsaghillo44 comments

The Stanford database class should be sill open for self study. It contains video lectures, and lots of database query exercises. For the exercises, you can write the query code in the web browser.

https://class2go.stanford.edu/db/Winter2013/preview/

I have taken some MOOCs in past years, including Andrew Ng's Machine Learning, and Martin Odersky's Functional Programming Principles in Scala, and I have to say that Jennifer Widom's database class is the most streamlined, most well thought, and most smooth of all the MOOCs I have seen.

Everything works, the lectures are packed with information and give sufficient material for one to complete the exercises, there are no rough edges, and there is a large-ish amount of exercises that give good coverage of the lectured material.

>I have to say that Jennifer Widom's database class is the most streamlined, most well thought, and most smooth of all the MOOCs I have seen.

I absolutely agree and I recommend this course every time someone mentions SQL. The lectures combined with the videos are the best learning tool for people interested in SQL.

I also recommend Introduction to Networks from Stanford which is also freely accessible with registration[1] and also very high quality similar to the DB course level.

[1]http://f12.class2go.stanford.edu/networking/Fall2012

It looks like the Stanford DB class will be running again starting in Jan 2014 on the new Stanford/edX platform. Here's a link to the class: https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/db/2014_1/abo...

Looks wonderful - I've been meaning to learn xpath properly for a long time, so I've signed up :-).

Author here - just wanted to say thanks for the feedback and kind words. I know there's a couple of rough UI edges in there yet, but I figured it was about time I just shipped something :-).

I'll take note of all the suggestions and try to fix anything that needs changing over the weekend.

Good work.

It looks pretty good and I'm going to be going through at least some of the exercises. It always feels good to ship something, even when you feel like it isn't 100%.

> It always feels good to ship something, even when you feel like it isn't 100%.

Sort of, although at first I found showing it to the world a touch nerve-wracking :-). Realistically though, if I waited until I judged things were 100% ready I would never put anything out there.

Hey AlisdairO, great work!! Any way to get in touch with you? My email is in my profile.

How can you retrieve all the information from the facilities table?

SELECT * FROM Facilities

ERROR: relation "facilities" does not exist Position: 15

Query was: SELECT * FROM Facilities

Useful.

It looks great, it's almost there but you've got to approach these things from the point of view of a novice.

Thanks for the feedback - I've modified the page so a refresh should show that the question specifies the 'cd.facilities' table. Hopefully soon I should be able to implement a mini tutorial that walks you through the page the first time you see it, and points out that the help button will show you the db schema - I'm aware it's not too obvious as things stand.

In getting started it does give the table names... which are all prefixed cd.tablename, it is an educational tool so one would expect one to read the getting started pages first.

Would one? Do you read your manuals perchance?

There are different types of learner, some learn by poking stuff with a stick rather than meticulously reading everything.

I have no idea about postgre as I know SQL Server & MySQL, I was actually having a quick go to see if my knowledge easily translated.

But schemas are a YAGNI 99% of the time feature in those.

I have to agree, my experience was exactly the same.

>But schemas are a YAGNI 99% of the time feature in those.

What? I literally have only ever written one web app that didn't use multiple schemas, and that was a simple blog. I think you are confusing "I don't bother to use X" with "X isn't very useful".

Most people don't bother with them, it's like juggling namespaces, mainly a complete waste of keystrokes.

There's little to no chance of collisions but you have to use them constantly, which is annoying. Few benefits, lots of downsides.

I don't think it's just about collisions, in fairness. There's also the aspect of managing user permissions by schema, searching for tables, and so on.

Obviously this only becomes super-useful in pretty sizeable projects, but I tend to consider using schemas a good habit to be in.

Have you ever tried using them before? You can set your search path, you don't need to type out schema.table. Your objects are already in a schema anyways, it isn't like you type out public.table all the time. What are these "lots of downsides" you leave unspecified? And how do they outweigh the benefits of grouping database objects together for both namespacing and permissions purposes?

> it is an educational tool so one would expect one to read the getting started pages first

This is the opposite of how it should be. You'd expect learners to be less likely to read a "getting started" page than an expert.

For example, saying to a beginner, "Oh, the tables are all prefixed with cd.tablename" will likely result in a look of confusion because the beginner didn't understand any of the words you used or the way in which you combined them. Is that period special, for example? You said prefix, so if I type "cd.tablenamefacilities" will that work? What are tables and how do I know what their "name" is? Why is the error message talking about "relations?" And so on.

Very nice!

Small suggestion: I looked at a random sample - the basic dates exercise (http://pgexercises.com/questions/basic/date.html) and had a bit of trouble finding the name of the table / schema description generally. It was not obviously that this is a pop-out under "Help".

Yes, I had that feedback on proggit too - I think I'll try making a mini-tutorial that points out a couple of the more important/less obvious UI elements the first time you load one of the exercises pages.

Thanks for the feedback!

The index page links "Getting Started" as "an introduction to the dataset" and there you'll find descriptions of the tables.

As someone trying to sit down and learn PostgreSQL right now, I am so happy this exists.

Very nice! Bookmarked.

A little suggestion: The "home" link in the menu points to index.html rather than the bare domain. Thankfully, I'm no SEO expert, but I'm fairly sure this is duplicate content in google's eyes and will penalise you in result rankings. Looking forward to the github repo.

Thanks - I'll put it on my list of things to fix :-)

Does anyone else have the problem of teaching SQL to business people who aren't necessarily that technical but still need to run reports?

I have found direct access to run queries is a very powerful tool but teaching SQL is tough to people who are not that technical.

I also keep running into this. I spent several years working in the "business intelligence" field. This essentially involved me using a reporting tool of some kind and writing SQL for business people that didn't know how. I never got to do any actual analysis like I wanted because I was too backlogged with report requests from the less technical.

I think SQL is something every business analyst should know how to write. It's an extremely powerful tool.

Not myself directly, but my cube mate had this problem before he left for greener pastures.

There was no resolution. He tried to teach them SQL, however when that failed he fell back on at least trying to get the Cognos scripts under SVN. He left two weeks ago, and just last week I overheard a conversation along the lines of:

"He showed me this Tortoise thing, but when I hit update everything has red next to it. It used to be green, but no matter what I do it stays red."

At this point, I don't even know what could have been done. He was probably working on this for his entire employment here, which was close to a year.

I find a lot of the issues are a bit beyond the syntax as well. Looking to pivot or otherwise manipulate the data which require advanced query and data analysis skills. It does help to show that their reports aren't always as simple as they think.

We've had a different solution to the same observation: When they start learning SQL, people struggle writing their INSERT INTO when they should start learning SELECT first.

Congrats on your idea, I've been looking for resources to learn the Postgres dialect specifically and it's great we're all in the same ecosystem. My solution was to make a Postgres front-end that would be as easy as spreadsheets [1].

I'm looking for a few customers who would help me get into the improvement/feedback loop. Please do not post me yet on the first page of HackerNews, the product is too young to be judged;) And sorry for people who think this is wrong advertising.

[1] http://www.play-sql.com

http://pgexercises.com/questions/basic/where3.html

The query I used was "select * from cd.facilities where name ~ 'Tennis';" which got me the tick, but the page didn't detect that I hadn't used LIKE and the feedback was therefore wrong. You might want to think a little more about different solutions to the exercises.

Other than that it's slick and impressive so far, thanks. I shall be sending the URL onwards.

Good point. In the early exercises I'm trying to limit the number of possible routes I throw out there - but I'll modify the exercise in question to mention some of the other possibilities!

Hope you find the site useful.

Theres also http://postgresguide.com/ which is intended to have practical examples of various Postgres and SQL features.

Pretty sure it’s just Postgres now, not Postgre or PostgreSQL.

No, it's called PostgreSQL. Some people abbreviate it to Postgres or pg. See also http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/ProjectName.

Thank you, this is excellent!! Just when I needed it too.

Problem "Where2"

Fails: SELECT facid, name, membercost, monthlymaintenance FROM cd.facilities WHERE membercost > 0 AND (membercost / monthlymaintenance) < (1/50);

Succeeds: SELECT facid, name, membercost, monthlymaintenance, (membercost / monthlymaintenance) as a FROM cd.facilities WHERE membercost > 0 AND (membercost / monthlymaintenance) < (0.02);

You're running into the fact that Postgres doesn't automatically cast ints to floats - so 1/50 = 0. Try using 1.0/50.0 instead.

Or get dirty and cast it.

::floatval

The "Show" button in "Answers and Discussions" should really switch to a "Hide" button when the text is revealed. The current toggled state, which is the down-state of the "Show" button, is too subtle and I couldn't tell that it was toggled to the down-state. I thought it was a bug at first.

Good thought, I'll put it on my list.

Nice!

Several options were recommended when I asked for help learning SQL several months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5713882 ), including one interactive website:

http://sqlzoo.net/

Nice, I like Postgres a lot, but sadly now I live in Oracle world. Will give it a try at home.

Back in 2005-6 I used http://www.sql-ex.ru/ to study and learn SQL, it worked fairly well with Postgres.

Very cool. Does something like this exist for other databases too?

aghillo, thank you for this. Seems that the exercises are comprehensive enough to cover beginner SQL. As someone also starting out SQL, I appreciate all the hard work you put into this project.

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