Besides being the two variants I'm most familiar with, MySQL and SQLite have the most variety of GUIs and, ostensibly, the most help docs...but the point of the SQL isn't for them to learn even the most basic things about database admin (I decided to skip over indexing and I just provide the SQL dumps for imports)...it's: 1) be able to handle datasets of more than a million rows (Excel and Spreadsheets top out at around 1M), 2) be able to join datasets on foreign keys (in the past, I've tried Fusion Tables, but the merging function is a bit wonky, and is pretty inflexible)...and 3) ...something that I've now since realized, it's a great way to show the difference between learning how to use software (i.e. Excel, Google Spreadsheets), and learning how to tell the computer explicitly what you are trying to find.
The most practical difference for me is that it's much easier for me to describe a data querying process through pseudo-SQL than it is to describe all the submenus and clicking and highlighting you have to do in a spreadsheet....the tradeoff being, you have to get past the wall of learning SQL syntax. But I was very surprised...the students picked it up very quickly, even a student-athlete who hasn't been able to come to a single class...(and no, I don't think someone is doing his homework for him, since I meet with him weekly and he's since been able to work on SQL and datasets on top of what I've assigned him)...
They're still a long ways from understanding SQL to the point of being able to administer a DB, but that's OK, the class is about querying and investigating data...and using SQL to the point where they can wrangle the data to analyze/visualize it in other software (such as a spreadsheet)
