Reddit reviews Data Management: Databases & Organizations

I found this book: https://www.amazon.com/Data-Management-Organizations-Richard-Watson/dp/0471715360 incredibly friendly for beginners.

I especially liked the exercises. They are similar enough to the things he covers in the chapters that a beginner wouldn't be lost, but just different enough to force you to learn. To check if you did them right, there's an answer key somewhere online. If I remember correctly, there are tables you create and populate with data to help you practice, as well as a database project near the end that gives you just an entity-relationship diagram and then you have to make it and query it.

In the beginning, I just used the command line + text editor (on Linux), because I wanted to be able to look at a blank piece of paper and know how to code it from scratch - it helped me memorize things better. Later I also used MySQL Workbench for convenience, which is free, but I don't know how it performs on a Mac.

Database Management. You WILL need a database and knowing SQL isn't enough.

My advice is to pick up Data Management by Richard T. Watson. Yes it is expensive, but it covers through post-graduate material (and also what I used for my intro to databases last semester).

I'm a business analyst here too - do you have any experience with SQL at all? I'm not creating databases wholesale or even writing the insert statements - our development team does that - but the main reason most places ask for that is because you'll need to be able to write basic queries in order to pull reports. I took a class during my master's degree. This was the textbook we used.

If you put in your cover letter something to the effect of "While I don't have two years of SQL experience yet, I am familiar enough with MySQL to be able to run basic queries for reports as necessary" -- then most places you apply to will overlook the missing experience. They just want to know you can grab data and manipulate it.