Need to brush up on SQL and other skills for job interview
October 22, 2017 8:22 AM   Subscribe

I have experience with SQL and relational databases but it's been a little while and I'm rusty. I'm applying for my dream job and I need to knock it out of the park. I've posted parts of the job description inside & I want specific classes, resources, etc. I'm willing to pay a little bit.

Job description:
"Develop expertise in all SQL applications. Demonstrate proficiency in SQL Integration Services, SQL Reporting Services (SSRS), Visual Studio, SQL Database Management, SQL Analysis Services and SQL Data (OLAP) Cubes."

"Gain knowledge of EPIC, Provide Enterprise and Dentrix programs to effectively integrate all health services for improved operations and reporting."
I honestly have no experience in most of these but I need to convince them that I know what I'm talking about and I can pick things up quickly. I know I can do this. This is a very small IT department and the interviewer will probably not be very technical. My inside source told me they are primarily looking for personality and culture fit. It's a healthcare nonprofit and I have extensive knowledge of their mission.

I need tutorials, books, online courses, whatever will help me.

Please don't be a downer and say there's no way I'll get this job. I'm already depressed enough. You're free to skip questions!
posted by AFABulous to Technology (14 answers total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
Stanford Online

I don't know if this is the exact same material as the version they did through Coursera, but that one was excellent. Even if it's changed, I suspect it will still be good and the price is right.
posted by Candleman at 8:38 AM on October 22, 2017 [3 favorites]


Data Camp is very good, but I found their tutorial on joins to be a bit cumbersome.

Udemy also has a SQL bootcamp.
posted by Young Kullervo at 8:52 AM on October 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


You may find the AdventureWorks sample databases provided by Microsoft to be useful for your studies. Also a GitHub.
posted by xyzzy at 8:56 AM on October 22, 2017


Before I read the job description, I was coming to suggest the Stanford course. But it sounds like what they're actually after is more knowledge of administering SQL Server, rather than being able to write SQL queries. (The later Stanford database mini-courses cover some design/administration stuff.) Microsoft has a whole slew of courses on EdX, some of which are focused on SQL Server.

If they're a health care provider, Epic is this Epic, but I don't know what learning materials they offer. (I happen to have interviewed for a job there once, so being able to find the website is about all I know.)
posted by hoyland at 8:57 AM on October 22, 2017


(That said, I might revise my answer if you said this was for an analyst-type position rather than an IT position.)
posted by hoyland at 8:58 AM on October 22, 2017


In addition to the formal classes listed, MSDN has tutorials and introductions to all of those topics. it can be a great way to get introduced to how MS is framing how those products are to be used. This is especially true of Integration Services and Reporting Services which from the outside are pretty straightforward in what they accomplish. Cubes and OLAP are a whole different animal and will be much harder to pick up in the short term.
posted by mmascolino at 9:04 AM on October 22, 2017


It sounds to me like what they are looking for is BI development with the Microsoft stack.

SSRS is a GUI reporting tool with a server. SSIS is an ETL tool. SSAS OLAP cubes are for dimensional data warehouses. The formula language for those is MDX and do not attempt to learn that for a job interview.

The best resources for these if you are tight on time are the tutorials on Microsoft’s website. You will need to go to MSDN and get SQL Server developer edition and set it up. Bear in mind that OLAP cubes particularly last saw big investments in SQL Server 2008 r2 (seven years ago), so that’s legacy technology.

Or you could focus just on the SQL aspects, which you will find much easier to ramp back up on.
posted by crazycanuck at 9:06 AM on October 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


Not to abuse the edit window: they have been making changes to modernize SSRS in the latest version, but I think you could apply any learning in newer versions to older environments.
posted by crazycanuck at 9:09 AM on October 22, 2017


The snippet from the job description seems to be mentioning Microsoft specific technologies rather than general SQL concepts (though I would expect general SQL knowledge to always be helpful), so you should probably be looking at Microsoft specific training.

It sounds like they only expect you to be able to learn Epic, Provide Enterprise and Dentrix after you start. I'm fairly sure you can only reasonably get Epic training if you work for an Epic customer so I wouldn't worry about doing this in advance.
posted by duoshao at 9:13 AM on October 22, 2017


Response by poster: Since this is a small non-profit it's likely that their software is not the latest version (or the version before that...).
posted by AFABulous at 9:14 AM on October 22, 2017


Have you checked all the usual suspects like lynda.com, pluralsight or Udemy for courses?
posted by cgg at 9:33 AM on October 22, 2017


If you need to bone up on the language itself, Khan Academy has a section on SQL queries: Intro to SQL: Querying and managing data.

For some similar interviews, I've had to whiteboard SQL queries and commands; this might be useful for you. Good luck!
posted by spinifex23 at 12:51 PM on October 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


There's quite a bit more to the Microsoft BI stack than just SQL queries, and assuming that you can write a decent join with a group by, you'll probably be fine for SQL queries, so I'll cover the rest of what the job spec implies.

Working as I do with healthcare data, I deal with time spans more than the kind of sales numbers type things that are in (the Microsoft demo) AdventureWorks database and cube. This means that the one tricky thing that you might be tested on is how to tell if two timespans overlap:
a inner join b
  on a.endDate > b.startDate
and a.startDate < b.endDate
I can't think of anything that would be more tricky than that that would come up in a code test.

But apart from that, I think that the rest of your crash revision period would best be spent having a browse around the SSAS (analysis services cube), SSRS (reporting services front end) and SSIS (importing and transforming data, i.e. ETL) parts of SQL Server, while following the Microsoft tutorials linked above. It's free to download. Current versions are collectively known as SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools).

Probably, you'll want to mainly cover their ETL process and data warehouse: how they load data into their SSAS cube and what measures and KPIs they calculated on this (and then report on in SSRS). This video looks long at 2 hours, but it's a more cogent overview of how and why you'd build a data warehouse and what you'd report on than you'd find in a course. This should give you a reasonable model of where the back end reporting fits into a system, and the motivations for splitting out OLTP (online transactional processing - the usual CRUD database backend of a web system) from OLAP (online analytical processing - the reporting database, denormalised and optimised for aggregating across the whole dataset). That's what I'd be wanting to hear a candidate for a post like this.

Good luck, and congratulations on the interview!

I do quite strongly recommend that your first step is to watch that video I've linked above.
posted by ambrosen at 3:54 PM on October 22, 2017 [4 favorites]


In case you didn't know, SQL Server Express edition is free and pretty full featured. You can get experience on a local copy while watch training vids.
posted by LoveHam at 8:23 AM on October 23, 2017


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