SQL is a deceptively simple language. Across its many dialects, users can query databases in a syntax similar to English. What you see is what you get… until you don’t.

Do you store your music, videos, and personal files in a garage full of hard drives? My bet is… no. Unless you’ve avoided iCloud, Dropbox, and Google Drive the last fifteen years – and if you have, props to you! – then you’re likely using cloud storage. You can recover your texts if you lose your phone; you can share files with links instead of massive email attachments; you can organize and search your photos by who’s in them.

When I started learning SQL, I found it hard to progress beyond the absolute basics. I loved DataCamp’s courses because I could just type the code directly into a console on the screen. But once the courses ended, how could I practice what I learned? And how could I continue improving, when all the tutorials I found just consisted of code snippits, without an underlying database I could query myself?

From ancient government, library, and medical records to present-day video and IoT streams, we have always needed ways to efficiently store and retrieve data. Yesterday’s filing cabinets have become today’s computer databases, with two major paradigms for how to best organize data: the relational (SQL) versus non-relational (NoSQL) approach.