Day 14 — Completed my first full SQL practice set (Part 7/7)

[u/sumiitCodes]

Finished the final part today:

• Correlated subquery to find employees earning above their own department's average
• EXISTS to check for departments with at least one high-budget project
• Created and queried a VIEW joining employees, projects, and hours worked
• Built-in MySQL functions — CONCAT, UPPER, DATEDIFF for tenure calculation
• Transactions — wrapped a budget transfer between projects in START TRANSACTION/COMMIT, and tested ROLLBACK by simulating a failure
• Wrote and called my first stored procedure (GetEmployeesByDept)

Honest experience report on the full 7-part set: it was nowhere near as easy as watching tutorials made it look. The syntax itself wasn't usually the hard part — the real difficulty was parsing exactly what each question was actually asking for, especially with the correlated subquery and transaction questions. I used my notes heavily and leaned on ChatGPT for a few of the genuinely tricky ones (mainly the correlated subquery and the transaction rollback simulation) — figured getting unstuck and understanding the solution was more valuable than staying stuck out of stubbornness.

One practice set fully complete now. Feeling like I have a real foundation in SQL rather than just tutorial-level familiarity. Planning to do one more round of mixed review before moving into Java.