My father works as a molecular biologists. As part of his job he needs to be able to determine which genes match certain criteria. Fortunately large databases exist which hold the information he's looking for. Unfortunately, he has no idea how to search these databases. This means whenever he wants to look up which genes have parameters A,B, and C, he has to go to bioinformatics guy, describe what he's looking for and hope that the bioinformatics guy picks appropriate values for A,B and C. While this process works, it is quite slow. It also doesn't allow him to tweak his queries to easily expand or limit his search based on the results of his first query.
What he really needs is a way to build or at least tweak queries on his own. He already understands the database is sorted into columns. He also has an idea of what values might be appropriate for a column(the biology part). What he has no idea how to do, is tell a computer what values to look for in those columns. Actually he has very little idea how to use a computer for anything but checking e-mail and browsing the web. I need a way of teaching him to be able to do basic SQL queries. More importantly I need to teach him regular expressions. As I have very little experience in the subject I was planning to teach myself first so that I can help him learn. Googling around I have found any number of resources that should suffice to teach me regex. However I am not certain they will work for my father, reading a tutorial once or twice is not going to be very illuminating or lasting. I would like a way for him to be able to practice using the expressions as he learns them. Even better would be a way they he could use them in conjunction SQL commands so that they are in the appropriate context for when he needs them. I could set up a simple database at home and teach him to bounce commands off of that until he becomes proficient in searching it, but why reinvent the wheel unnecessarily. Do any gerbils out there know of a resource that allows you to practice SQL/regex as you learn it?
TLDR = What's the best SQL/regex tutorial you know of?