How Long Does It Take to Learn MySQL

If you are thinking about picking up MySQL database skills you may have asked yourself “How long does it take to learn MySQL?”. We are going to cover this but keep in mind all of these times are best estimates and your mileage may vary.

It takes anywhere from about 3 hours to 3 weeks to learn MySQL. It all depends but I’ve seen different sources list different times. It depends heavily on how much you already know and how much you want to learn. There are several different factors that you might want to consider:

• Do you have an IT or computer science background?
• Do you know other databases?
• How fast do you pick things up?
• How much time do you want to send each day?
• Do you already know the SQL language?
• What platform are you using ( Linux, Windows, OSX, etc. )?
• Do you want to cover advanced topics or just the basics?
• Do you need to learn clustering?
• Do you need to learn to use code to interface with MySQL ( PHP, Python, Java, etc. )?
• Are you a developer or a DBA?
• Do you want to learn about design patterns and best practices?
• Do you want to learn about database security?

If you are experienced and you already have some tech skills and you are good at picking things up, you should probably be able to sit down with a good tutorial and learn all of the core skills for MySQL in as little as 20 minutes. If you want to know everything there is to know and you aren’t using a good tutorial, I could see this taking days of actual learning time.

You might spend another hour or so to learn the SQL language ( which you should learn first ). You might spend a few hours if you don’t have any experience and you want to be able to:

• work with more advanced queries
• learn the intimate details of all parameters and options

If you want to learn how to work with it programmatically and you already know the language that you will be working with, you might spend as little as 20 minutes or as long as 2 hours learning how to do this. It depends on how much time you want to spend tinkering with it, how many examples you want to try out, and how good of a coder you are.

Some courses claim to teach you MySQL in 3 hours while others claim to take 3 weeks.