SQL Practice for Beginners
Query the Murder is a free SQL practice game for beginners. You solve murder mysteries by writing real SQL — starting with simple filters, building up to joins and aggregation as the case unfolds.
No setup, no account, no installations. Open a case in your browser and start writing queries.
A beginner SQL learning path
The cases are designed so that each question teaches one concept at a time. Here's the progression you'll follow in the early cases:
- SELECT and WHERE — retrieve suspects, filter by name, age, or location
- ORDER BY — sort events to build a timeline
- LIMIT — narrow down to the most relevant rows
- JOIN — connect two tables (e.g. people and locations) to find who was where
- GROUP BY and COUNT — spot patterns, find outliers, count occurrences
- Subqueries — answer "find everyone who was at X and also at Y" in one query
What makes this beginner-friendly
The database schema is always visible on screen — you never have to guess what tables exist or what columns they have. Questions are ordered so you build on what you just wrote. And if you get completely stuck, a reveal button shows you the correct SQL with an explanation so you can learn and keep going rather than giving up.
What you're practising on
Each case uses a custom dataset based on an Agatha Christie novel — suspects, locations, timelines, relationships. The data is rich enough to support real queries (multi-table JOINs, aggregation) but scoped small enough that you can understand the whole schema in a few minutes.
How to start
Case 1 is the right starting point for beginners. If you know what a table is and have a rough idea that SQL is how you query databases, that's enough. You'll learn the rest by doing.