You have already gotten good academic and research based advice, so I'll toss something else in. Install MySQL on your machine to play with. If you have acces

You have already gotten good academic and research based advice, so I'll toss something else in. Install MySQL on your machine to play with. If you have access to a Wordpress install that has some data in it, take a backup of that and restore it to your machine and learn how to write queries for it. The way to figure out what to query is ask yourself questions, like, how many blog posts were posted in the past year. What was the count of blog posts per month for the past year. Stuff like that. And anything that you could see someone asking you to answer. BTW -- I am not suggesting that Wordpress is an amazing database design, but it is fairly typical of what people do so its a reasonable place to learn. Then once you feel pretty comfortable there, take a couple of the public datasets you can find online, Amazon shares a bunch of them and you can find others. Then create a database, import the data and write queries against it, following the same process of asking questions that seem interesting. You can even take the max-mind CSV file they provide and create a database out of that to learn how to query it and get answers. It is a small and simple dataset but there are a number of things you can figure out using it. While I personally prefer postgres, I think MySQL is probably a good place to learn as there are a ton of tutorials and resources for it. After you master the concepts then you can switch between platforms much easier, MS SQL, MySQL etc. The basics are the same between them all, even though each has their own quirks and gotcha's, knowing how to work in one you can always ask Google how to do X in Y if you already know how to do X.