Any ideas to help improving my skills faster would be appreciated 😜

Question

Working on my SQL code

SELECT firstname, lastname, salary FROM employees
WHERE salary > (SELECT avg (salary )FROM employees )
ORDER by salary DESC ;

Answer 1

Practice improves skill.

If you want an idea to optimize that query, refactor to use a join and group by instead of a subquery. joins perform better than subqueries so this would be a practical improvement.

Aside from that little task, try to create a full application that uses an SQL database.

If Java is your strongest programming language, you could make a little Java application using JDBC to connect with an SQL database. It could be a text-based user interface for managing emloyee information.

After that, you could make a web application. Java MVC frameworks can be challenging if you're new to programming but there are plenty tutorials and you'd get much closer to ready for paid work.