UW Certificate in SQL Server & Database Development: Instructor Q&A

Instructor boB Taylor of the Certificate in SQL Server & Database Development explains how the program enables students to learn how to build and manage databases using Microsoft SQL server. To learn more, visit: https://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/sql-server-database-development

Video Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:11 What makes this program stand out?
00:28 What tools/software will students be exposed to?
00:55 What projects can students expect to complete?
1:32 Who is a good fit for this certificate program?
2:02 How important is continuous learning?

Video Transcript:
I am boB Taylor. I'm a cloud solution architect engineer at Microsoft, working in the database space.

It's not just an academic approach to the Transact SQL language, but rather we’re gonna expose them to other capabilities, other tools that they'll see in the real world when they have a job as a SQL developer.

In addition to all the tools that ship with the SQL Server product like SQL Server Management Studio, the students will also get exposed to things like Azure Data Studio, which is a new modern interface for working with databases. Additionally, they'll learn things like Git, which is a source control system. They'll learn database modeling tools like Draw.io or Lucidchart.

We start from scratch. We give the students a set of business requirements and they have to build and design a database. They then use that database throughout that first quarter to implement some of the basics to the language. In the second quarter, we focus more on an industry sample database that has best practices, and we learned a lot more of the advanced tooling techniques.

Then in the third quarter, Randall has the students do a end-to-end BI analytic solution, starting from data extraction, ingestion, and into the reporting system.

Anybody that's looking to upskill a little bit, maybe they had some computer programing experience, maybe they're a full stack developer and they're a dot net developer and they want to learn the back end and learn SQL Server as a database.

And in some cases it's exposure to areas of the product that you may not have had exposure to in the past. We start from the ground floor, assuming they know nothing at all about data, and we take them up to the point where they're effective coders.

SQL Server generally releases out of the box every 2 to 3 years and there's a wealth of new improvements that come out with each version released. This is the age of innovation, and in order to stay current, you have to be a lifetime learner.