[zachgalant]

I took it at Stanford, but it was using the same online content.

The course is probably way more theoretical than you'd expect. It goes a lot into relational algebra, schema design, and UML.

The online SQL quizzes are pretty cool little puzzles but the only truly exciting part of the class was creating a website using a large database as the final project, which I can't imagine will be offered in the online version.

If you don't know anything about databases or are trying to learn SQL, it could definitely be worthwhile.

[newhouseb]

> The online SQL quizzes are pretty cool little puzzles but the only truly exciting part of the class was creating a website using a large database as the final project, which I can't imagine will be offered in the online version.

The year I took it, they couldn't get the Oracle licenses sorted out in time so they forewent the entire final project. They ended up just talking about XPath and Data Warehousing instead (both of which seemed way too enterprise-y to me at the time to commit either to long-term memory). The schema design stuff I found helpful, if only to drill into my mind the importance of data normalization.

[NamTaf]

It sounds like I'll hopefully get something out of it, given I'm purely self-taught post-high school. Some rigour to my existing practical capacity would be useful.

Do you believe it'll offer this?

[nnq]

A: Yes, I think so. I'm self thought guy myself, at least, when it comes to programming, and I really enjoyed watching the relational algebra videos and then the SQL ones (never got to the modelling part though, got all my learning time sucked by a big work project)... go through them at 1.5x or 2x speed and you won't regret it, at least if you had no encounter with relational algebra before, as it feels good to know there's some nice and simple math behind SQL :) (though now I want even more to shoot the guy that invented SQL's ugly syntax and all the database implementors that piled tons of "semi-compatible" shit on top...)

[henrik_w]

I think it would be useful for you (see my other comment for details).