Best place to learn SQL - Cheap/Free?

[Johmford]

The best way to learn is by doing. If you have programming aptitude then I suspect you won't have an issue.

Though I learned SQL around two decades ago at this point, when I learned it I did so because I wanted to use it for a project. So I installed MySQL on my Linux box and just started playing around with it, using the documentation as a resource. Once I started getting into the more advanced stuff I ended up buying a book on SQL and reading that. Since then I branched out to other SQL variants, but as a programmer, I thought SQL was pretty intuitive.

These days you can watch YouTube videos and there are tons of free web resources available to help you learn SQL. I also recommend Codecademy or Youtube if you don't want to grab an e-book and learn it on your own.

Btw, are you still using COBOL? I did some work with COBOL in the 80's but haven't seen COBOL in use anywhere since the late 90's or early 2000's. I assume if you're still supporting COBOL applications, you must be supporting some legacy business apps or old mainframe TPS services.

COBOL all day, the copyright on the system I use daily is from 1987 I believe. They are actually working on putting a new system in place in an oracle table format so that users going forward will access data from there instead of the current SOR. So I need to be able to use the new Oracle sql database and do some high level overviews of the data in it.