My Hands-On SQL Home Lab
Hello, and welcome to another installment of my journey to becoming a Cybersecurity Professional.
The past week and a half have been spent on learning and validating my understanding of the content within the 'Intro to IT' course (D322) at WGU. I've thoroughly enjoyed the process of reading and taking notes with Obsidian. Earlier this week, I took my Pre-Assessment (PA) for the course and passed! However, I'd like to make sure I do as well as I can on the Objective Assessment (OA) and will be writing a few articles covering the concepts learned within the course.
With that said, here are a few takeaways from my review of the PA:
???1. I am a bit weak on SQL, and its commands.
???2. The Project Management and System Development Life Cycle are a little more involved than I originally thought!
Today's brief article will focus on documenting my practical hands-on experience with SQL.
I researched and reviewed a bit with w3schools and YouTube videos before I landed on a video that I thought would work out for me. Since I've started using VMware as my primary hypervisor, I looked for a Windows 11 virtual machine. A brief search showed me where to download a Windows 11 Enterprise developer evaluation edition from Microsoft.
After downloading and setting up the VM, through Windows 11, I went ahead and downloaded/installed the Microsoft SQL Server, the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), and a sample database to learn from.
Below is the window you see upon installation of the server. Since I am doing all of my learning through the SSMS, I didn't spend much time here.
After loading the database I had installed (it took some time to find it, unfortunately), I was presented with a functional database to practice my SQL queries with!
It is one thing to read, but a whole other thing to use what you theoretically learned practically. Here we see my query that selects the Customer Name table from dbo.Customers (the dbo. can change to anything you'd like, as I've learned).
And now we will do another query, asking to have the Customer Name and the accompanying notes displayed. I've learned that this is considered an "implicit join". Note that this brings about a syntax error, due to improper format not using KCC to identify the database.
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Lets fix that real quick..
There we go! Now we can see the data that was requested.
I then learned that you can change the column names to fit your desired output. It doesn't change the actual database, just the output. #cybersecurityrocks
Now I will do my first asterisk request "select all".
After learning and applying several different queries that I won't bore you with, I was introduced to the Query Designer. This makes any database query absolutely doable and available to any individual, regardless of their experience level.
Overall, I'm happy that I decided to invest some time in this. Before doing so, it was all just words on a page that meant nothing to me except in a theoretical sense to pass an exam. Now, I at least have some experience using SQL!
On to Project Management and System Development Life Cycles!
A big thank you to Kevin Stratvert and his YouTube video detailing how all of this works, and how to set it up. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0nxCDiD-zg)
Experienced Technical Analyst and Project Manager with a passion for driving successful outcomes and exceeding project goals.
1 年You can also utilize a 'use' statement to indicate the database you wish to query: use kcc select * from dbo.whatever where {some criteria}{operator}{some criteria} Wait until you start playing around with joins.
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1 年Cool Lab, I’ll share some SQL content with you I’m working on when it’s done