Integrate this feedback on Exercises: Foundational Relational Database Knowledge

[tannerwelsh]

I think that this goal is difficult to complete within a weeks sprint. I also, feel that there was a missing link between the first tutorial and the zoo; there are a lot of new concepts that we are expected to know how to do. In my opinion, there should be a core sql requirement, before the relational databases; I had a steep learning curve, when i got to subqueries, various forms of joins etc. Many people struggled with the concepts; this made it hard to find help.

(1) This goal was challenging, as in I learned new things and that I feel more confident in approaching databases but (2) the tutorials were hazy at best. SQL Bolt was the best resource, SQLZoo was very difficult, in the user interface, but more so in the actual content and readability. The Leek exercises were unclear, and even when we copied and pasted the solutions from the site into the field, the answers came back wrong... With HackRank the questions were easy and clear, but the second section of Database Normalization required knowledge of concepts that we had not covered in any other section of the entire goal (and me not having any point of reference or context {being in week 3} for how or why these Queries are important... it was frustrating!)

This goal, for the most part, was good but as usual, i think someone needs to go through the tutorials as they don't always work properly. As an example all of the answer within the browser parts literally would not take correct answers that its own system said were correct solutions accepted in the past

Organize the goal by date. ZQLzoo took us 3 days to complete

The goal was good, but some tutorials were extremely redundant. The goal could be removed by removing some SQLzoo exercises.

This goal alternated between too easy and too hard pretty sharply. Some of the exercises at the end came with no previous context for what we were asked to to, while many of the exercises in the beginning reiterated the same concepts over and over again. SQLZoo was not something I would like to work with again. Each lesson had several exercises that were no-brainers and felt like hand-holding then it would immediately switch to several exercises using concepts that had never been mentioned before. Additionally, the quizzes are buggy and sometimes the answers are incorrect (one asked for European countries, but the 'correct' answer included Russia and another had two identical correct answers, but would mark you wrong for one of them). The last exercise in SQLZoo includes instructions on how to download a database through Linux, but not how to use OSX. The LeetCode exercises were a huge jump in challenge level from the previous tutorials and we were marked as incorrect or called on syntax errors that didn't exist (on one exercise, we had to switch to Postico to check our syntax and the query worked perfectly). The challenges through HackerRank had nothing to do with any of our previous tutorials or challenges, but were easy to get through once we Googled the concepts and did a bit of individual reading - it was still hard to see how some of them related to what we had been doing the rest of the week.

[tannerwelsh]

maybe this goal should just be disabled, as #254 mostly replaces it...