You could start with the SQL section of w3schools.com. It's a big picture overview of SQL and it has some pages focused on how to accomplish things specific to different database programs. Get comfortable with that first. The rarely spoken truth is that SQL isn't very hard to pick up. Your value will largely depend on your ability to translate business logic into SQL. Practice. Pick an industry/type of business. It might be best to start with one you're very familiar with on your first run through. Set up your database environment. Securely store all the information required in your set up. Ex: authentication type, administrator account user/pass, database name, etc Gather information on what the business would need to store in a database. Ex: an animal shelter would need a pet table, a kennel/cage table, immunization/medical information table, license/tag table, a table to store people who surrender or adopt .. you get the picture. Make it as detailed as you can, if it's realistic, talk to someone in that line of work, but don't get caught up in making it perfect. 5-10 tables should be enough for the first time around. Design the tables in the database. Pay attention to data types as you go. You'll want to consider the data as it is today, and accommodate for growth. Ex: your table has a field, char(10) as the data type. The data stored is currently 10 characters long. Business needs change, and this field now needs to store 12 characters. Save yourself the headache and start with making it varchar(20) at creation. Also pay attention to keys and how you intend to join tables. I strongly advise putting primary keys on every table and setting them to auto-increment. This gives you a quick out when it comes to duplicate records. Generate data for your tables. Google "data generator" and find the one you like the best. I've used https://generatedata.com/ in the past, it's not terrible but I recall a lot of tweaking to get exactly what I needed. Research. Chances are there's something easier out there. If dropping money on it is not an issue, Regate has a SQL Data Generator for a yearly subscription price of $264. Probably easier to work with. Load your data into the database. Ideally, the data generator provided you with a SQL script that runs a bunch of inserts, one click and done. But it's possible you got a csv or Excel file. Most dbms's come with an import tool of some kind, this the perfect opportunity to learn how to use it. The rest is the fun part. Conjure up potential business scenarios your business might encounter. In the animal shelter example, a couple things might happen: animal adoption, animal surrender, kennel change, new license/tag, etc. Consider what would be most important if you needed to report on these situations, put some queries together, maybe create some views. When you're pretty comfortable with that, start looking into how you'd update data. An animal surrender wouldn't just be entering into the pet table, you'd also want to store the person who surrendered the animal and assign them a kennel. Also: retaining historical data for record changes is a valid business requirement. If it didn't come up in your original design, figuring out how to implement it is good practice. Sorry so long, but it should get you started and introduce you to some situations you're going to encounter later on. Lots of luck! Answer from Deleted User on reddit.com