Top 10 SQL Project Ideas in 2024

Working with SQL is standard practice in software engineering, data science, AI, and related fields. This language is ranked second in Stack Overflow’s professional developer survey in the programming, scripting, and markup languages category.

SQL’s ubiquity in these circles means many job opportunities require individuals who are proficient in using it. Whether you’re a novice or you’ve just gotten a little rusty, working on some SQL projects will be a great way to practice and showcase your skills.

In this article, we’ll take you through our curated 12 SQL project ideas. These projects are divided into three groups based on difficulty, and the descriptions include details on the key objectives and helpful links to help you get started. Let’s dive in!

1. Sales Analysis

Sales analysis is a beginner-friendly yet useful SQL project. It can be applied in retail stores, manufacturing companies, chain stores, etc. This project involves creating a database and writing queries to analyze sales trends and offer insights that enable management to make data-driven decisions.

Put your SQL sales analysis skills to the test by attempting this takehome challenge on Interview Query. In this challenge, you’ll need to create a database for a grocery chain using the data provided. You’ll then have to write queries to give the team insights on issues such as the performance of different product categories, sales in various locations, and payment methods.

2. Blood Bank Database

Blood banks collect blood and send it to patients who need it. For this operation to function well, the blood bank must have good records of the donors and collected blood, which can be compared to patient data. These records also ensure the bank has enough blood in its reserves.

For this project, you are to create a database for a blood bank. The database should have records of donors, patients, and blood held in the blood bank’s stores. Relevant information for the different sets of records may be as follows:

• Donors: Name, Phone No., Address, and Donation Location
• Patient: Name, Illness/Injury, Blood Group, Allergies/Sensitivities
• Blood: Blood Group, Donor, Medical Details

Additional details can be added if the database is for multiple blood banks. Queries should be able to answer questions such as the availability of different blood types in the inventory, donations that match a patient’s needs, etc.

3. Inventory Management

Inventory management systems are used to keep track of stocks in stores, offices, and other settings. This helps companies avoid stockouts and overstocking, manage spare parts, track sales, prevent theft, maintain supplies of office consumables, etc.

Create an inventory management system based on this transnational retail dataset on Kaggle. This dataset contains product names, transaction dates, country of sale, and other information. Create a database and write queries to answer questions such as sales trends across different months and countries, best-selling products, sales during holidays/holiday seasons, etc.

4. Kickstarter Project Analysis

Crowdfunding on Kickstarter has become a popular way to raise money for anything from hospital bills to cutting-edge products. However, not every crowdfunding campaign succeeds.

For this project, your goal is to analyze data from over 300,000 projects on Kickstarter and extract any relevant insights. This dataset is available on Kaggle. Working on this project will help you learn how to clean, analyze, and visualize data. The insights may include which features have a strong correlation with successful or unsuccessful projects.

5. Patient Data Management

Hospitals manage a huge amount of patient data, such as when they were admitted and discharged, their diagnoses, who attended to them, and what procedures were ordered. An SQL database can be queried to provide critical insights from this data.

This takehome assignment from Interview Query requires you to create a database for patients admitted to a hospital. A data model is provided, and queries to the database should be able to yield information such as the percentage of admitted patients still at the hospitals, statistics on lengths of stay, etc.

6. Payroll Management System

Payroll processing is a common use of database management systems. These systems help companies calculate wages, benefits, taxes, and bonuses. They can also generate essential statistics and offer insights into the company’s recruitment and financial policy.

For this project, you’re required to create an SQL-based payroll management system with the following features:

• Basic salary information for each employee
• Computation of bonuses, arrears, housing allowance, and other benefits
• Computation and subtraction of welfare funds, transportation fees, and other expenses.
• Record of attendance and number of leave days used
• Computation of taxes and social security contributions
• Generation of a tax file and a pay stub

7. Ride-Hailing Driver Signup

Ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft need drivers on their platforms. More importantly, they need drivers on the road picking up paying customers. Therefore, these companies need to know if enough drivers are signing up, whether the drivers on their platforms are actually picking up customers, and how/when to incentivize these actions.

This takehome assignment on Interview Query presents this scenario as a data-science challenge involving an Uber Partner app. You’ll need to use SQL and other tools to analyze the data and perform predictive analysis. This problem demonstrates how SQL is used with other tools to give insights into more complex data science problems.

8. Smule User Analysis

Social media apps such as Smule make money based on the number of users who sign up and actively use them. They need to know how many users sign up, how many continue using the app after a certain period, how much revenue they make from a given user, etc. This information can inform marketing, investment, and other decisions.

This Interview Query takehome assignment is based on Smule. It requires you to use your querying skills to answer questions such as the number of users on the platform, how these users were acquired, how much revenue the company is making per user, etc.

These advanced SQL projects are more open-ended than the beginner and intermediate projects. The projects can be larger, meaning they have more features and are more complicated. However, they may also generate more corner cases that need to be accounted for.

9. Remote Server Status Monitoring with SMS Alerts

Many applications today have one or more features that rely on cloud servers. These servers ensure users in different locations have a seamless experience when using the app. However, servers may go offline or their functionality may be compromised due to unusually high traffic.

The goal of this project is to create a system that monitors the status of several remote servers and sends SMS alerts to users in case of a server issue. The database should have:

• Details of the servers being monitored
• A user authentication table
• A table with user details, including phone numbers
• Alerts and notifications that can be sent to users as an SMS in case of a server issue

Get a jump start on this project by checking out one user’s solution here.

10. International Debt Analysis

Many countries rely on debt to finance major projects and other expenditures. The World Bank is one of the main lenders countries turn to. Keeping track of this debt is a huge undertaking. The debt information can also be a key indicator of the health of a nation’s economy.

For this project, download the data on debt owed to the World Bank from their international debt statistics page. Use SQL to identify which countries owe the most to the bank, the total amount of debt owed, the total amount of debt forgiven, and the average amount of debt owed by all countries. You can also expand the objectives of this project to identify other interesting insights.

11. Electric Bill System Database

An electricity provider has to keep track of customer information, account information, electricity consumption on different days during the month, etc. The company also has to bill customers and issue invoices.

For this project, the objective is to use SQL to create a database containing customer, vendor, and billing information. The system should have a separate table for accounts to link customers and vendors. Pricing should be dynamic, meaning vendors should be able to define different tariffs, and customers must be able to provide feedback or lodge complaints.

You can check out this GitHub repository for hints on executing this project.

12. Fraud Detection

Fraud detection is vital whether you work in banking or retail. According to the ACFE, it takes 12 months on average to detect fraud. This is too slow, considering businesses lose around 5% of their annual revenue to such activities.

For this project, your goal is to use SQL to analyze the provided data and highlight transactions that are likely to be fraudulent. You will have to define the database model and create and populate the database before starting the data analysis. You can find the data in this repository as well as guidelines on how to execute the project.

There is no substitute for practice if you want to get better at using SQL. Working on projects with real-world applications is a great way to do this. This will help prepare you for technical interviews and give you projects to showcase your SQL skills.

You can explore more SQL project ideas by checking out the takehomes section on Interview Query. Our interview questions page also contains long-form problems that can serve as mini SQL projects. Use the SQL Interview learning path to brush up on your SQL knowledge, or if you’re up to the challenge, visit our Jobs Board to find out which employers need your SQL skills.

SQL has proven its reliability over the years and continues to be a prized skill in the tech community. By trying these 12 SQL projects, you’ll see how this language can be used to solve complex modern problems.