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Every SQL game and learning resource worth knowing in 2026. What each one teaches, where each one stops, and which to pick.
Conor Robertson
July 16, 2026 · 10 min read
The questions people ask when they are choosing how to learn SQL.
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SQL games are the best on-ramp anyone has built for this language. They take something that reads like paperwork and turn it into a reason to care: find the killer, survive the island, catch the fraud. If you are looking for SQL games or SQL learning resources, you can be writing queries within a minute, and most of them cost nothing.
There is one thing nobody in the category says out loud, though. Almost every SQL game is a single puzzle. It teaches SELECT, WHERE and JOIN, tells you who did it, and ends. There is no rung two. That is not a flaw in any of them, they were never built to be a curriculum. It is just the reason most people finish one, feel great, and then stall.
QueryCase was built to be the exception: the same detective framing, but as a full path that keeps escalating long after the story would usually stop, with the practice, the free-form data and the interview prep all sitting on the same account. Below is why it goes furthest, and what every other option on the market is genuinely good at.
How this guide was made
QueryCase is our own platform, so treat the section about it accordingly. Everything said about every other product here was checked against its live site, not recalled from memory, and each one is linked so you can verify it yourself. Where a rival does something better, it says so.
Every other SQL game is one story. QueryCase is a curriculum wearing a story, and that difference is the entire point.
GROUP BY, HAVING, NULL handling, string and date functions, CASE, subqueries, set operations, CTEs and window functions (ROW_NUMBER, RANK, SUM() OVER, LAG, PARTITION BY).JOINThe other reason the comparison is lopsided: every option below is a single thing. A puzzle, or a set of exercises, or a question bank. QueryCase is the learning, the practice, the playground and the interview prep in one place, so nothing you learn gets stranded.
Four detective ranks, Rookie to Chief. Each rank teaches a band of SQL, drills it back together, then gates the next rank behind an exam.
Open-ended cases with no guided steps. The data reshuffles on every attempt, so there is nothing to memorise. You get a schema and crack it with your own queries.
Spotify Wrapped, NBA, Steam and Pokémon among them. No CSV download, no Postgres, and you can JOIN across them.
SQL questions tagged by company, worked in a real editor and checked against a target output. The bridge from learning to hired.
One account, one login, one payment. Every other option on this page is a single tile.
All of it runs on a real database inside your browser tab (DuckDB compiled to WebAssembly), so you are writing genuine SQL against real data with nothing installed. If you want the full breakdown of what is taught at each rank, it is all on the about page.
This is the part no roundup does, and it is the most useful thing on this page: what does an hour of a SQL game actually leave you with, and what does it miss?
The left column is the on-ramp. The right column is the job.
That right-hand column is not exotica. It is the everyday content of real analytical SQL. GROUP BY with HAVING is how every "top N per something" report gets built. Window functions are how you rank, run totals, and compare a row to the one before it. And execution order is the single thing that explains why your query returns duplicates, why your alias "does not exist", and why WHERE rejects COUNT(*).
We have written the four that matter most, free and in full:
They are worth your time. Just know what each one is for.
SQL Murder Mystery, from Knight Lab at Northwestern, drops you into a crime database and tells you a murder happened. It is free, needs no account, and runs in the browser, and it is deservedly the most famous thing in this category: it made a lot of people realise a query can feel like detective work.
Good for: a free, brilliant hour, and proving to yourself that SQL is not boring.
Where it stops: SELECT, WHERE, JOIN and a little subquerying. It is one mystery, so when you solve it there is nothing after it.
If you get stuck partway through, we wrote a walkthrough that teaches the method without spoiling the ending: every query explained, the killer left for you.
SQL Island is a browser text adventure from Johannes Schildgen at RPTU Kaiserslautern. Your plane crashes and you stay alive by writing SQL. Free, no install, English or German, and it saves your progress.
Good for: day one, if you have never written a query and want the friendliest possible first step. Where it stops: beginner fundamentals, and again, it is one story.
SQL Police Department gets recommended a lot, so it is worth being precise about what it currently is. The premise is good: solve crimes by querying in the browser. But as of July 2026:
SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY, LIMIT and the comparison operators. Joins and aggregate functions are still listed as "in the works."Good for: a short, cheap detective fix if the free games have not scratched the itch. Worth knowing: it currently covers less ground than the free SQL Murder Mystery does.
Enough people type "SQL game Steam" into Google that this deserves a straight answer: as of early 2026, no. We have not found a Steam game whose subject is actually writing SQL, and we have looked. Steam's brilliant programming games, TIS-100, EXAPUNKS, SHENZHEN I/O and the rest of the Zachtronics shelf, teach invented assembly-style languages, which scratch a similar itch but transfer nothing to a database job.
There is a structural reason for the gap. A SQL game needs a real database engine answering your queries, and the browser turned out to be the natural place to put one: every game in this guide, ours included, runs in a tab with nothing to install, most of them free. If a genuine SQL game ever ships on Steam and is worth your hour, we will add it to this page.
Not games, but genuinely useful, and all free.
SQLBolt is a clean set of interactive lessons, free, no signup, running from SELECT through filtering, joins, NULLs, aggregates, subqueries and set operations. It is one of the few beginner resources that explicitly teaches query execution order, which is a real mark in its favour.
Good for: a tidy, no-nonsense walkthrough of the fundamentals. Where it stops: no window functions, no CTEs.
SQLZoo is the old reliable: exercises against real-ish datasets (world countries, Nobel prizes), free, no signup needed. Drier than the games, and the interface shows its age.
Good for: volume. Credit where it is due, it goes further than most free resources, reaching window functions including LAG.
Where it stops: it is a set of exercises, not a path. There is no story, no structure and nothing telling you what to learn next.
Select Star SQL is an interactive book, free, no ads, no registration, teaching you against a real dataset (Texas execution records). Roughly 30 minutes a chapter.
Good for: readers. It is the best-written thing on this list. Where it stops: query structure, aggregations and joins. It ends before window functions.
DataLemur and StrataScratch both sell what they should: large banks of real interview questions tagged by company (Google, Meta, Amazon, LinkedIn, Stripe and the rest). StrataScratch advertises over 1,000 challenges across 200+ companies and has a free tier; DataLemur has a free tier plus premium. Both need an account.
Good for: grinding volume once you already know the concepts. If your interview is next week and you can already write a window function, go there.
The catch: a question bank tells you that you got it wrong. It does not teach you why HAVING exists. That is the gap QueryCase fills, and its interview prep carries interview questions tagged by company (Google, Meta, Amazon and Netflix among them) in a real editor to bridge you across.
Find your intent on the left.
| You want | Go here |
|---|---|
| To actually learn SQL properly, start to finish | QueryCaseours |
| To get past JOINs into window functions and CTEs | QueryCaseours |
| Real data you actually care about, no setup | QueryCase sandboxours |
| A free, brilliant hour tonight | SQL Murder Mystery |
| The gentlest possible first query | SQL Island |
| A clean walkthrough of the fundamentals | SQLBolt |
| Free exercises, lots of them | SQLZoo |
| To read and think rather than play | Select Star SQL |
| To grind company-tagged interview questions | DataLemur, StrataScratch |
| Resource | Cost | Length | Goes up to |
|---|---|---|---|
| QueryCaseours | 10 cases free, then one-time | 54 cases, 12 drills, 4 exams | Window functions, CTEs |
| SQL Murder Mystery | Free, no signup | ~1 hour | JOINs |
| SQL Island | Free, no signup | ~1 hour | Beginner fundamentals |
| SQL Police Department | $20 / 6 months | A few free cases | SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY |
| SQLBolt | Free, no signup | Self-paced | Subqueries, set operations |
| SQLZoo | Free, no signup | Self-paced | Window functions |
| Select Star SQL | Free, no signup | ~30 min / chapter | Grouped aggregates, JOINs |
| DataLemur | Free tier + premium | Self-paced | Interview questions |
| StrataScratch | Free tier + premium | Self-paced | 1,000+ challenges |
All nine run in the browser with nothing to install. Each row was checked against the live site. Schemaverse is left out because its hosted server would not respond; SQL Police Department's joins and aggregates are still listed as in development.
That is the real decision on this page.
A puzzle is one story, one hour, one satisfying ending. The good ones are genuinely good, and you should play them. They will teach you that SQL is fun, which is the hardest lesson of all.
A path is what you need the next morning, when you have the taste for it and no idea what rung two is. The distance between "I solved the murder" and "I can write the query my job needs" is GROUP BY, HAVING, window functions, CTEs and knowing the order the thing runs in. Something has to carry you across it, and almost nothing in this category is built to.
That is what QueryCase is for. Start with the free rank and see how far it goes.