SQL, without the syntax.
Learning SQL usually means learning two things at once: how to think about data, and where every comma and bracket goes. We take the second one off your plate.
You build real queries by dragging the pieces into place — including the commas and brackets. Nothing can be misspelled. Nothing can be missing. All you do is think about the question.
No payment. No credit card. Just an email so your progress is saved.
Try it — this is the whole course in one interaction:
Warming up SQLite…
You've probably seen this idea before
If you've ever used Scratch — the thing where you snap coloured blocks together to build a game — this is the same idea, pointed at databases. The blocks only fit one way, so you can't write a query that's spelled wrong. You spend all your attention on the logic instead.
Then, quietly, we take the blocks away. The early chapters hand you every piece. Later ones make you fill in the values yourself. By the last chapter there are no blocks at all — you're writing SQL in a plain text box, and you won't remember when that started.
Blocks are training wheels. Training wheels you never take off are just a worse bicycle.
SELECT title, year + 1
FROM films|
The table answers back while you build
Most tutorials make you finish a query, press Run, and find out if you were right. That teaches you to guess.
Here there's a table of horror films on screen the whole time. Add a filter and rows disappear in front of you. Add a sort and it rearranges. You're not waiting to be marked — you're watching what your query does to real data, one piece at a time.
That's the part that makes it stick.
Fifteen chapters
The essentials — chapters 1 to 10
Everything you need to pull real answers out of a real database.
- 1Picking columns — SELECT and FROM
- 2Filtering rows — WHERE
- 3Matching text — LIKE and IN
- 4Sorting and limiting — ORDER BY, LIMIT
- 5Joining two tables — INNER JOIN
- 6Missing data — LEFT JOIN and NULL
- 7Calculated columns — maths and AS
- 8Totals and averages — GROUP BY, HAVING
- 9What runs first — the order SQL actually executes
- 10Changing data — INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE TABLE
Going further — chapters 11 to 15
The parts that come up in interviews and in real work.
- 11Ranking without losing rows — window functions
- 12Running totals and moving averages
- 13Comparing a row to the one before it — LAG and LEAD
- 14Asking "does this exist?" — EXISTS and NOT EXISTS
- 15Why queries get slow — indexes and reading a query plan
All fifteen are free. There's nothing to upgrade to.
Want someone to sit with you?
I'm Prabhat. I've been writing SQL professionally for over fifteen years — Oracle, Postgres, data pipelines, the messy real kind — and I teach it one-to-one.
A session is two hours, hands-on, over a video call. You share your screen and we work through whatever's actually blocking you: your own queries, a database you're stuck on, or a mock interview if that's what's coming. It's recorded if you want it, so you can go back over it later.
It's $50 for the two hours. Email me and tell me roughly where you're at and what you're hoping to get out of it. I'll reply personally with a payment link and a calendar link, and we'll find a time that works.
prabhatlnct2008@gmail.com