If you are located outside USA or Canada, don't take this course.

Because IBM cloud DB2 will not give you free account to do the lab exercises. Otherwise you have to pay 202$ to get an account.

I didn't continued the course due to this issue.

This course is more about IBM roping you into using a bloated cloud ecosystem, than it is about teaching you SQL. You will only learn DB2 stuff, and only through their cloud dashboard. This entire specialization is disappointing, but if you've made it this far, masochism may carry you through it.

The course teaches SQL quite well. But it doesn't teach and make practice about the connection to a database and use of sql magic. Hence, its very frustrating to understand the significance of '%sql' in a Final Assignment review. I think a lot of students are facing the same problem.

Hence, it feels like- Final assignment is to check whether we can connect to the database, rather than checking our subject knowledge on SQL.

I would've given a five-star rating gladly, if it weren't for the terrible user experience of IBM DB2 Console, which wasted 4 hours of my time trying to load three small csv files into database tables.

Apart from this "blocker bug", the course is well-organized and worth the price.

No live examples, no tutorial on how to navigate Db2 cloud. Maybe I was expecting too much; disappointed.

Only one star and I think it does not deserve it. On week 3 the assignment ask you to establish a connection with database and because It gives me an error for more than 3 weeks, I decided to use Forums. After a couple of dozen messages requesting for help, I received only 2 answers from the professor:

First: "Go to week 3"

Second: " Idon't see any attachment"

I have sent so many screenshots that it is ridiculous. So If you find yourself unable to connect to the database and it gives you a constant error; my suggestion is PRAY!. Please, do not cry like me in desperation after a month. Just PRAY. I think it could work... someday

In case IBMER's fails to have DB console lite access, its difficult to complete the assessments, hence there should be other alternative to practice it.

Although the material was clear and concise, working with IBM Db2 Cloud was a headache due to its unresponsiveness

Horrible experience. The course is not updated. The ibm cloud function doesnt work at all. There are hardly any videos. Most of the content is just theory which you can read from anywhere. Dont waste your money.

Overall good course but a few typos and unclear instructions, mostly with the labs and our own 'user specific" DB2 specs which were needed for the 1st and 2nd lab - yet, clear instructions for doing so were posted several labs afterward. Labeling of individual labs (their titles/ filenames, when opened in Jupyter notebooks, did not correspond with the actual weeks in the course that the should have - wks 2 were called wks 4 and wks 3 were called wks 6) That made it a bit confusing at times. They appear to have been from a different course or earlier revision. Maybe revisit and revise this course soon for better flow. Also, please check the comments/discussion boards and address those concerns that are repeatedly coming up. Quite a few more students than just myself were stumped or confused over the same issues. Thank you.

Worth all the effort..! Great coursework if you're willing to spend some time to understand DB2 infrastructure,creating Db2 database on IBM Cloud, compose and execute SQL queries, and access a database from Python based Jupyter notebooks. Key takeaways from the course : - Creating databases on IBM Cloud - Troubleshooting basic loading errors - Working closely on creating tables on real time IBM DB2 instances - Connecting to db instances using python and perform basic data summarization - Performing data loading through RestAPI's

This course teaches you the basics of SQL completely unrelated to Data Science. SQL is not mentioned in any further courses in the specialization. Could have very well skipped this course from the specialization. There was not even a single assignment that involved both SQL and Data Science.

No videos for week 2, sub-queries were confusing and questions 9 and 10 on final project are very 'vague' and 'confusing' with asking questions about Area(s) when in examples and previous course work we were taught to use group by, but correct answers did not use group by.

Too much IBM oriented and specific.

The IBM cloud "service" leaves much to be desired. Multiple times I've experienced outages while I was in the middle of lab assignments. It's a paid course where they give you "free" credits to do the course work in their cloud "service." But the credits are inadequate for the labs and they constantly ask for your credit card to buy more "service." While the class is okay I wouldn't recommend it to anyone because of the poor IBM cloud support.

The hands-on labs were extremely engaging and the quizzes were very informative.

Amazing. The difficult in the SQL is very good to make you think in real life problems.

Practice lab assignments were excellent in reinforcing my learning, they were just the right kind of challenging. This course has been the best one in the Data Science Professional series by far.

it is a great course for beginners who wants to have an understanding of Database concepts and hands on experience as well

This is a great review of an important topic. If I knew how much this mattered for the advanced capstone course I would have paid more attention. As it was, I came back here frequently.

Good course with practical exercise, however some problem on lab exercise connection

The course is very helpful and easy to understand. The reason I only gave it 4 stars is because learners had to deal with many technical issues which were not relevant to the study, while doing labs and assignment. The upside is I guess it is part of shaping the right learning attitude. Many thanks!

please give details on how to connect database with notebook

The lectures were confusing at first, because the syntax in the lectures did not exactly match the syntax for the assignments (though this issue went away in subsequent weeks).

More exercises would've been nice.

In all, a decent course.

Guidance is not sufficient. Questions are not answered as needed.