Okay so this question is directed towards anyone with SQL experience. Is MySQL bad to start and bad for beginners? It seems intimidating if Im being honest. and Im confused on how to set everything up and get started and working with SQL and Databases in general

Never heard of mysql being bad, if you only using the basic stuff then any sql base database should be fine

Go and watch some tutorial series on youtube. That'll get you through setting it up

Man, I've worked with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Informix, and SQL Server. And to tell you the truth, they are all the same to me... Don't be sacared to try anything, there's tons of tutorials online for any tech you wanna try. Good luck.

For 90% of use cases MySQL is pretty straight forward, sadly I usually delve into that extra 10%.

Table and field design are important to understand also having some knowledge in 2nf and 3nf principals will be good to know, so some tutorials and a bit of reading will get you to understand a lot.

Setup is well, install MariaDB and create password for root and away you go - until you need a prod environment at least.

@devTea really? Never heard of mysql? Mariadb? No?

@mundo03 I mean never heard anything bad from them lel

As @telephantasm said, all relational databases are the same, at least on their basics.
PostgreSQl follows the standard closely.
MySQL cab be found on any shared hosting
Oracle is proprietary and you won't see it unless you work on a BIG company, and most likely not even then.

Mysql is a good place to start, search for mariadb, same thing, community mantained opensource etc.

@devTea it has its moments, but you usually are arm deep in a complex multi table (10-15+) query with on the fly calculations before you stumble into any real issues.

For learning and 90% of cases - mysql is enough. The last 10% are probably out of your reach for next 10+ years.

@devTea ah that makes sense lel

@C0D4 If you really need that complex queries, then there is something wrong in your architecture or you selected wrong tools for the job.

@hitzoR not necessarily.
There are times you’ll have 2 or 3 completely unrelated pieces of data that you need to be able to report on together, I work in a retail environment....

For example:

Need to extract total “ipads” sold by “x” user per state, which where purchased from “y” supplier that didn’t include promotionL pricing between “b and c” dates but only when sold with “k” manufactures accessories.

in order to bridge these up, sometimes you need to get a little creative even with a well structured database.

@C0D4 That seems like typical BI workflow. You should have used data pumps, DWH, OLAP cubes and things like that to do reports. This is the scenario where all relational databases with normalized data will always fail.

@hitzoR that would be the ideal scenario sure. But you do what you gotta do until business decides it’s a good idea.

@Bubbles , as per your question, no. MySQL is not a bad language and it will be very useful (and even mandatory) when you will be required to interact with databases.

Because MySQL (SQL at its core) is the best declarative language for querying and interacting with databases.

There is a reason why it has a monopol as the most used query language since it was publicly available in the 80's up until today.
It is relatively easy to understand and it is based on algebraic equations which yields as good performance.

It is still the most prominent declarative language and it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

I think its a must for the majority of programmers/developers and even data scientists.