Shadowing Practice: Learn Basic SQL in 15 Minutes | Business Intelligence For Beginners | SQL Tutorial For Beginners 1/3 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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In this video, you're going to learn the basics of SQL querying in just 15 minutes.

And by the time we're finished, you'll be wondering what all the fuss was about.

Are you ready?

Then let's get started.

Hello and welcome to Vitamin BI, bringing you business intelligence for beginners and beyond.

On this channel I help you do more with data, so if you're new here consider subscribing.

Right, so as I said in my intro I'm going to teach you the basics of SQL querying,

the essentials that you'll need to know if you're considering becoming a business intelligence analyst.

Obviously we can only go so far in 15 minutes, but I promise you

that by the time we're finished

you'll be able to understand quite a lot of what you might be called upon to do.

We'll be focusing specifically on querying data, not creating or deleting databases,

tables or data, just selecting data from tables that we want to return for our specific needs.

Before we get started, let me give you a little context.

You might be wondering why you need to learn SQL with BI tools becoming more and more sophisticated.

Can't they write the SQL queries for me the answer to

that is yes and no yes

when it comes to requesting data for different charts graphs and tables

that you might want to present in dashboards in these cases

the bi tool will have some kind of graphical interface to be able to drag

and drop fields to return data but no in

that in a lot of cases you'll need to write sql queries to pre -aggregate filter

and select only the data necessary for the project that you're working on.

These are often called views and you create views mainly

because it's more efficient than connecting to all data when you only need some of it.

So you could have a table that contains millions of rows of data

but by creating a view of it your BI tool will

only need to work with a few thousand making analysis and presenting results much faster.

So you see, knowing how to query with SQL is a useful skill to have.

Let's jump onto my computer and get started.

So today we're working with a SQLite database that I found online, containing data compiled from the FIFA video game by EA Sports.

So soccer stats.

I'll leave a link to the database in the description if you want to play around with it too.

In terms of the tool I'm using to query the database?

It's called NaviCat.

It's the premium version that allows you to connect to and query pretty much any relational database.

But they also have a version for specific RDBMS like MySQL, SQL Server, etc. Link also in the description.

Here we're in the NaviCat interface.

On the left we can see that I'm connected to the SoccerDB connection

that I've created and in that connection is a database called main and in that database we have various tables country,

league, match, player etc. We're going to be working mainly with the player table.

If I double click it we'll see the data contained within that table.

We've got three different IDs, player name, birthday, height and weight.

What I want to do is write SQL queries

and ask the database to return specific data from this table so I'll open a new query window.

Now when we're asking for data we're using what's called a select statement

so that's what we need to write first and

if we want to return the whole table in the result we do so with a star.

Then we specify the table that we want to select everything from.

In this case the table called player select star from player then we run the query

and the database returns all data from that table you may notice

that i've written everything in lowercase

because the sequel isn't case sensitive however i have the option to what's called beautify the sequel

and when i do you'll notice that select

and from have been capitalized although it's not obligatory this does actually make your queries easier to read.

It's not so important with such a small query like this one

but when you've got one with tens if not hundreds of lines of code it really does make life easier.

So we've selected all fields or columns and all rows from the table

but what if we only want to select specific fields?

Simple.

Instead of the star we just write out the field names

we want separated by commas like this player underscore name comma birthday I run this,

and those are the fields returned.

When we select specific fields, we can also rename them by creating aliases.

To do this, we use the as function.

So player name as name.

And we can see that update.

We could specify an alias containing a space, but to do this, we would need to put the name in quotes like this.

Full name.

Let's go back to all data

and look now at how we can ask the database to only return specific rows in the result.

To do this we use a WHERE clause with different operators.

For example, we could select only players with a weight of 190 pounds.

So we use the equals operator.

We could also select any player with a weight greater than 190 pounds or greater than or equal to 190.

You see, it's not that complicated.

And we've gone from over 11 ,000 records to just under 1 ,000 being returned.

We can also specify more than one condition by using either

and or or so weight greater than 190 and height greater than 190

so both conditions must be met if I change it to

or it means that either condition must be met in order for the row to be returned

so that's selecting rows based on the value in integer fields what about when it comes to text values?

Well, we can also use the equals operator to find any row where the text matches exactly with what we specify.

PlayerName equals Aaron Galindo.

But we could also use the like operator which achieves the same goal.

But what if we want to select just rows from all players called Aaron?

So basically the player name field starts with Aaron.

Here we can use a percent character after the text to look for, like so.

And we get all Arons returned.

If we wanted to find any player name that ends with Aaron, we put the percent character before.

Nothing that ends with Aaron.

We could put a percent before and after, which would basically mean any player name that contains Aaron.

And we've got Rolando Arons.

Finally, here's an example which puts the percent in the middle of text.

So here we'll return all rows where the player name starts with a and ends with n.

you can go even further with the like operator by using

underscore to represent single characters an example would be like t underscore m percent

so the underscore is asking for any rows where the player name starts with t

then any character between the t and the m followed by anything and run.

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We've got Tamas, Tamir, Tim, Timmy, etc.

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There are also things called wildcards that allow you to go even further

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when specifying the rows you want to return but we won't go into those for this video.

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We will however finish looking at the where clause by talking about a couple more operators that you can use.

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For text fields we have in which allows us to specify multiple or statements, more simply.

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However, it can only be used for exact matches, so we can't use percents or underscores with it.

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So let's look for Ronaldo and Messi.

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Open brackets Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi.

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For integers, we can use the between operator.

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So I could say wear weight between 180 and 190.

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Finally we have the isNull and isNotNull.

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Null being empty.

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In this table we don't have any null values.

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But if I open up the match table we can see that there are lots in there.

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So select star from match where home player 1 is null. or is not null.

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There we go.

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Let's go back to our player table and see how we can sort results.

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We can do this using the ORDER BY clause.

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The rows are currently sorted by the ID field in ascending order.

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But if we wanted to sort by weight, we can say ORDER BY WAIT.

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This sorts by weight in ascending order, because that's the default sorting method when not explicitly specified.

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But we can change this to descending order by adding DESC now we can see who the heaviest player is

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when it comes to sorting data using order by this isn't something that's overly important for our use case

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because when we're selecting data to create views we're usually then going to connect

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that view to a bi tool and use

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that for building individual chart queries

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and these tools will let you apply sorts to the data

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now we're going to look at how to join data from different tables.

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To demonstrate this I'm going to use the player attributes table.

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We can see that in this table we have the player ID but not the player name.

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To be able to create a view containing the player name plus the overall rating

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we would need to join the data from the player attributes and player tables.

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I'm going to start by specifying player API ID comma date comma overall rating.

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Now I want to get the player name from the player table.

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How do I do that?

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Well because we're going to need fields from two different tables we need to specify which field comes from which table.

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We do this by writing the table name dot field name.

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So player attributes dot player API ID.

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Same for date and overall rating.

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Now we can specify, perhaps after the player ID, player dot player name.

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If I run this I'll get an error saying

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that there's no such column as player .playerName because we're saying that we're looking for it in the player attributes table.

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This is when we need to specify the joining of the tables using one of the four join types.

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I'm not going to go into them in this video

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but I'll probably do a separate video that explains them in more detail so don't forget to subscribe.

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So in this case we'll use an inner join

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and we'll say inner join player the player table on

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and now we specify what fields

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we want to use to create the join in this case we're going to use the player api id field

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which is contained in both tables

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and again we have to add the table name first dot field name equals player dot player API ID and run.

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Now we have the player name appended to the player attributes table data.

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Pretty clever right?

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But let me show you something even more clever.

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I showed you earlier how to use the as function to create aliases for fields.

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Well we can actually do this for tables as well which makes the query much cleaner.

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First I'm going to give the player attributes table an alias of a and the player table an alias of b.

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I just need to write these two letters after where I've specified each table.

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So a after player attributes here and b after player here.

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Once I do this I can now replace the table name for each field like this.

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You see, much cleaner.

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So, you may notice that there are multiple rows for each player on different dates.

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So how would we add up all of these different values for each player?

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Well, to do this, we're going to want to aggregate the data using the SUM aggregator.

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I'll add this to the overall rating field and run the query.

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Ah, that's not what we were expecting.

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But that's because we haven't specified in the query how we want to group the data together.

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This is when we need to use the GROUP BY clause.

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When we use the GROUP BY clause we need to add into it all of the fields that we need to group.

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So in this case essentially all fields apart from the overall rating.

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A .PlayerApiId, B .Playername, A .Date And run

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This is correct, but not exactly what we want.

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We want to combine all of the ratings for the different dates,

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so we actually want to remove the date field from the specified fields as well as the group by. and run.

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That's better.

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But let's clean it up by aliasing the sum overall rating as rating.

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Let's sort this descending.

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Order by rating descending.

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Strange that Ronaldo and Messi aren't in there at the top.

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Let's try and see why this is.

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Perhaps there are just more entries for some players when we sum them up.

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To find this out, we could add a count of b .playerName.

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And yes, in this case how about using an average?

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I'll replace sum with average, avg, and run.

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And there we go, that makes more sense.

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We're going to go one step further and filter this result.

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To do that we can use the HAVING clause.

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The HAVING clause is only applied to the result of the GROUP BY function, so isn't the same as the WHERE keyword that's applied before.

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And it's only applied to numeric values, so in this case I'm going to ask for only ratings above 85.

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I need to write it directly after the group by and before the order by.

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So having rating greater than 85 and run.

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Only 26 records.

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And there we have our final query.

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I'll beautify it and this is what it should look like.

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You can see that all of the SQL keywords are capitalised.

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And you can see that we've come a fairly long way in a very short space of time.

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We've only covered a very small part of SQL as a whole, so there's masses more to learn.

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But what I've shown you today is a really good foundation for giving you the confidence to dive deeper.

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Did I not say that once we'd finished, you'd wonder what all the fuss was about?

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If you got value out of this video, please do like, share

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and subscribe for more videos like this one why not start with this playlist here as always thanks for watching

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I've been Adam Feiner and until the next time stay BI curious

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Learn Basic SQL in 15 Minutes”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: player, table, field, row, select. This video has 201 sentences and 2466 words to shadow. The speech runs for 17:28. The speaker talks at a steady 141 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
query noun	/ˈkwɪɹ.i/	A question, an inquiry (US), an enquiry (UK).
select verb	/sɪˈlɛkt/	To choose one or more elements of a set, especially a set of options.
specify verb	/ˈspɛs.əˌfaɪ/	To state explicitly, or in detail, or as a condition.
database noun	/ˈdeɪtəˌbeɪs/	A collection of (usually) organized information in a regular structure, usually but not necessarily in a machine-readable format accessible by a computer.
rat noun	/ɹæt/	Any of the numerous members of several rodent families that usually have short limbs, a pointy snout, a long, hairless tail, and a body length greater than…
operator noun	/ˈɑpəˌɹeɪtɚ/	A person or organisation that operates a device, system, service, etc.
clause noun	/klɔːz/	A group of words that contains a subject and a verb; it may be part of a sentence or may constitute the whole sentence, depending on the syntax in each…
attribute noun	/ˈæt.ɹɪˌbjut/	A characteristic or quality of a thing.
connect verb	/kəˈnɛkt/	To join (to another object): to attach, or to be intended to attach or capable of attaching, to another object.
null noun	/nʌl/	A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
subscribe verb	/səbˈskɹaɪb/	To write (one’s name) at the bottom of a document; to sign (one's name).
descend verb	/dəˈsɛnd/	To pass from a higher to a lower part of (something, such as a flight of stairs or a slope); to go down along or upon.
chart noun	/t͡ʃɑɹt/	A map illustrating the geography of a specific phenomenon.
rating noun	/ˈɹeɪtɪŋ/	A position on a scale.
pound noun	/ˈpaʊ̯nd/	A unit of weight in various measurement systems.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
go back to verb	To stem from; to originate in.
add up verb	To take the sum of; to total.
open up verb	To open.
write out verb	To write at full length or in expanded form.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

Let's jump onto my computer and get started.
In terms of the tool I'm using to query the database?
You see, it's not that complicated.
In this table we don't have any null values.
How do I do that?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	If I double click it we'll see · If I run this I'll get
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've created · i've written · have been capitalized
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	might be called · are often called · have been capitalized
Possibility with “might / may” might/may + verb — something that is possible but not certain	might be · might want · may notice

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 70 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, I'm, I'll. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: efficient /ɪˈfɪʃənt/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, dashboard /ˈdæʃˌboɹd/
Long words — get the stress right: operator /ˈɑpəˌɹeɪtɚ/, complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, aggregator /ˈæɡɹɪˌɡeɪtɚ/, capitalize /ˈkæpətəˌlaɪz/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like query, select, specify.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Learn Basic SQL in 15 Minutes | Business Intelligence For Beginners | SQL Tutorial For Beginners 1/3 - Learn English Speaking with Video

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