Introduction to SQL

Date: 16 and 17 February 2026, 9:00am-5:00pm both days

Modality:  Online

Duration: 2 days

Price: $800 (incl. GST)

Short course structure and topics covered:

This is a gentle, fast-paced introduction to SQL, aiming to build a strong foundation and intuition for SQL programming, with an emphasis on building and testing reliable SQL queries. We use Microsoft’s flavour of SQL (called Transact-SQL) but all of the fundamentals, which are core SQL standards, are transferrable to all others, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle SQL, and so on. This course is accompanied by an extensive set of notes and exercises.

Day one

• Introduction to database technologies
• The basic structure of a database and the usefulness of the SQL relational database model
• SQL tables, relationships between tables, and primary/foreign key pairs
• Connecting to a remote SQL database in the Azure Data Studio development environment
• Introducing SQL coding with easy examples and the most useful data manipulation queries
• Fundamentals of SQL: search conditions, subqueries, and joining tables
• Exercises for practice and revision.

Day two

• Reading and interpreting Transact-SQL documentation
• Syntax and intuition for filtering and aggregating on grouped data
• Skills for iterative development, using the SQL data definition language to create test tables
• Design our own databases, with which we can safely test complicated queries as we write them.

Who should attend? Any entry requirements?

The course is suitable for beginners.

If you want further advice on whether this course is right for you, please email nzssncourses@auckland.ac.nz.

Payment for short courses is normally by credit card. If you need to pay by invoice or require assistance, please email shortcourses@auckland.ac.nz. Please note the University does not issue individual invoices for amounts less than $500 New Zealand dollars.

By enrolling in a Short Course at the University of Auckland you agree to the Short Course Terms and Conditions