Why I Wrote Yet Another SQL Tutorial

A quick Google search reveals that there are already hundreds of SQL Tutorials freely available on the web, almost as many books, courses, and video tutorials as well.

I’m actually incredibly excited about it and I wanted to go over some of the reasons why I thought this was a valuable use of my time and why I think this SQL tutorial is different and better than anything yet created.

There are a lot of tools and abstraction layers for working with data available today, but SQL still remains incredibly dominant as the main exploratory interface to data. It’s the language that all of these tools are built on top of, and none of them (yes, even our VisualSQL… yet) have yet quite captured all of the flexibility and power you get from just getting down to writing a query.

SQL isn’t really that hard to learn. It just takes some practice, interactivity and some curiosity. With a great tutorial, it should be much more approachable to many more people. Which brings me to..

I’ve always wanted a SQL tutorial to just have a great interactive query editor and executor built right into the text. With that goal I created what I call SQLBox, which does just that.

Readers are prompted throughout the tutorial with examples and challenges that they can execute against a real PostgreSQL database that’s already been setup for them.

This makes following along incredibly easy and encourages play while learning, which I think is key to really understanding a subject.

Chartio’s mission isn’t “Get people dependant on our product, and gather as much revenue as possible.” If it were, I’d have written this tutorial only teaching our VisualSQL.

This SQL tutorial is highly inline with that second component of our mission. I believe more people can and should learn SQL, and hope that with this tutorial I’ve reduced that barrier of entry for some people.

Like any well organized company, driving toward solutions to our mission should ideally result in some increased revenue as well. This tutorial is no exception there. Our target market is business users and analysts who’re looking to get more informed by their data. Many of these people go out seeking to learn SQL (and unfortunately don’t find much help). If we can help them with that, they may also find our tool quite helpful as well.

We enjoy that that second strategy of our mission, expanding data literacy through prolific education, also brings us more attention, great branding benefits, and more customers. This money is put back into more education and more product improvements, positively reinforcing our mission and increasing data literacy of the world!

We have a whole section of tutorial content at

So far we’ve written the mid-level sections, and we’ll continue to expand in the following ways

If you haven’t yet learned SQL, know someone who’s learning, or want to brush up in our practice areas, check out the new SQL Tutorial. We’d love any help in sharing it out and are always eager for any suggestions/requests/feedback.

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