I am a systems engineer and want to develop database skills. I want some serious training, but am almost sixty years old and don't have years to go through all their prepatory classes before I can take their DB classes.

Where would you go to get some serious training?

I have been searching, but have yet to find what I need.

What's your goal? Employment? Interest? There are at least three specialisms within the database field too - modeller, administrator and developer - what is of interest?
What is your eduction level?
Where are you?
How do you define "serious"?
What are your current database skills?

What's your goal?

To be able to create and access database systems at work. Specifically, record meta data about telemetry and the telemetry data itself so we can compare today's tests with those of the past. The critical part of each test is quite short, so the specific data are not large in size. There are maybe 20 to 30 meta parameters to go with each test.

Employment?
Yes, this is for current use and to increase employability in the future.

There are at least three specialisms within the database field too - modeller, administrator and developer - what is of interest?

Interest is to create databases, mine them for items of relevance, then extract selected data for comparisons.

What is your eduction level?

BSCS (Computer Science) from University of Texas, graduated '88. Have been working as systems engineer for ten years. Did mostly assembly language and Fortran, some Pascal and Cobol, some C and a little C++ on Unix systems. Have Visual Studio 2008 but my programming skills are rather out of date.

Where am I:

Panama City Florida working at Tyndall AFB, doing telemetry work. No colleges in the vicinity. My degree is old enough that colleges want me to take numerous prerequisites before I can take the courses I really want.

What are your current database skills?

I have played with Access a bit and aware of some of the database fundamentals such as normalization and understand the need for it. Cannot write SQL.

Visual Studio has an SQL server. The problem is that when I start getting into working with Access, SQL, and Visual C++, I wind up with more questions than I can ask of formum participants. I need a someone, somewhere, where I can go for some serious explanations.

Does anyone have experience with eClasses.org

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Oh ok.
This is all interesting stuff.

It sounds to me then that you are not starting from a standing start, have a very good foundation of knowledge and also have a very specific goal (I did not realise your goal was a project - I imagined you were after more generic knowledge specifically to change career).

Personally I don't then think the sort of generic things I had in mind will really suit you - they are likely too long term and abstract with regard to your goal.

Perhaps you should try us here with some questions in the forums. I might be wrong but it sounds to me that you don't require formal, structured training but perhaps some self guided learning and a mentor or two to go to when stick on something specific.

This is something you can read right now:
The Relational Data Model, Normalisation and effective Database Design

I found Chris Date's Introduction to Database Systems a good book for the theory underlying relational databases if you want something of a more academic leaning. I also studied post grad (in the UK) distance courses but these are perhaps something for someone at the start of the career rather than (no disrespect) someone in the latter stages of their career.

No disrespect was detected or imagined, and exactly right. I'll never have the skills of a trained database engineer (and, to my opinion, database design does merit a full blown degree path.)

But to be something better than a hacker (in the negative sense), I do need some skills.

Thanks for the thoughts and the recomendation.