---
title: "7 Ways to Make Your SQL Workshop Beginner-friendly"
description: "Shopify’s 90-minute SQL workshop serves new RnD hires with varied technical backgrounds, including participants who may have no experience with databases or programming. It separates beginners from intermediate learners and aims to help beginners use data responsibly to discover insights. The beginner format spends its first 30 minutes on data warehouse architecture, data preparation, and privacy, then uses real production data and tools such as Mode Analytics with an accessible dataset. The curriculum identifies core SQL objectives, translates them into practical questions, starts with SELECT * exploration, and builds queries toward a larger analytical question. It also provides beginner, intermediate, and advanced learning resources covering topics from foundational clauses and aggregations to joins, window functions, CTEs, and Presto-specific techniques."
---

# 7 Ways to Make Your SQL Workshop Beginner-friendly

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · 2023-10-18 · May 21, 2020

**Type:** Tutorial

## Summary

Shopify’s 90-minute SQL workshop serves new RnD hires with varied technical backgrounds, including participants who may have no experience with databases or programming. It separates beginners from intermediate learners and aims to help beginners use data responsibly to discover insights. The beginner format spends its first 30 minutes on data warehouse architecture, data preparation, and privacy, then uses real production data and tools such as Mode Analytics with an accessible dataset. The curriculum identifies core SQL objectives, translates them into practical questions, starts with SELECT \* exploration, and builds queries toward a larger analytical question. It also provides beginner, intermediate, and advanced learning resources covering topics from foundational clauses and aggregations to joins, window functions, CTEs, and Presto-specific techniques.

## Context

New RnD hires come from varied technical and non-technical backgrounds, and many beginners have never encountered databases, tables, data models, or SQL queries. The workshop aims to help them use available data responsibly to discover insights and make better decisions within 90 minutes.

## Approach / What changed

The workshop separates beginner and intermediate groups, explains data warehouse architecture and responsible data use, uses real production data with Mode Analytics, selects an accessible dataset, maps objectives to practical questions, begins with SELECT \* exploration, and builds toward more complex queries. Additional learning resources cover intermediate and advanced SQL concepts.

## Takeaways

- The first 30 minutes address data origins, warehouse flow, raw versus cleaned or modelled data, privacy, and the instruction to avoid querying production systems directly.
- A beginner exercise should use a dataset whose domain and structure can be explained in three sentences or less; Shopify often uses support tickets for this purpose.
- The core curriculum includes SELECT, DISTINCT, FROM, WHERE, JOIN, GROUP BY, and ORDER BY, plus COUNT, AVG, and SUM, with resources extending to window functions, CTEs, and Presto techniques.

**Tags:** [SQL](https://yomu.fyi/topic/sql)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/7-ways-make-sql-workshop-beginner-friendly)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/7-ways-make-sql-workshop-beginner-friendly
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-31T01:12:38.620Z

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