Creating Basic SQL Reports in SQL Server

This course is ideal for people who know fundamental T-SQL concepts and would like to create meaningful SQL reports in MS SQL Server.

Welcome to our Creating Basic SQL Reports in MS SQL Server course! Over the course of several chapters, we'll teach you how to make practical use of your SQL knowledge. You'll learn the most common types of basic SQL reports and build them step by step.

Imagine that it's 2016—Pokémon Go briefly takes over everyone's social life, and you're running a comic book store. Somewhere between asking visitors to stop playing while inside and worrying about your book sales dropping, you're planning on moving your store online. But how will you know if it's the right thing to do or if it will lead to more revenue? You won't until you crunch the numbers!

Data is collected everywhere—from marketing software counting URL clicks to sales representatives creating customer profiles and Facebook recording its users, your digital footprint is making an impact on the future of shopping all over the world. Thanks to data, we're able to measure our performance and make more informed, strategic decisions. But first, you need to know how to collect and analyze that data.

The Creating Basic SQL Reports in MS SQL Server course is divided into six parts and consists of 97 practical exercises that you can access straight from a web browser and at your own leisure. At the end of each part, there's always a short summary quiz to check how much you remember.

As a warm up, we'll start with a quick introduction to the database model that we'll be working with in the course and review your basic SQL skills.

(Psst! If you don't feel confident with your basic SQL knowledge at this step, you can always brush up on it in our SQL Basics in MS SQL Server course.)

Then, we move on to show you how to use popular SQL aggregate functions such as COUNT() or SUM() to summarize data in SQL, like counting business objects based on selected criteria or calculating total amounts based on multiple objects.

After summarizing data in SQL, we move on to show you how to classify data: how you can create custom classifications of objects in SQL using the CASE WHEN syntax and how you can use classifications to group objects in the GROUP BY clause. This course explains the intricacies of the GROUP BY clause and reviews a few typical mistakes that beginners make.

Next, we'll tackle multi-level aggregation so you know how to calculate averages of averages and how to organize longer queries in a clear way. You'll learn how to put multiple metrics in a single report, calculate ratios and percentages, and compare global and specific metrics.

Finally, we'll talk about comparing different business groups in a single report, and we'll show you three methods of doing this so you can always pick the best solution based on the result you want to achieve.

Once you finish the course, you'll be able to create a wide range of simple SQL reports, organize long queries, include multiple metrics in a single query, and operate on a database with several tables.