University of Michigan - PostgreSQL for Everybody Specialization

INSTRUCTORS

Instructors: Charles Russell Severance

Course Description

Across these four courses, you’ll learn how to use the PostgreSQL database and explore topics ranging from database design to database architecture and deployment. You’ll also compare and contrast SQL and NoSQL approaches to database design. The skills in this course will be useful to learners doing data mining or application development.

Applied Learning Project

This course series utilizes a custom autograding environment for an authentic set of graded and practice assignments, including: creating and manipulating tables, designing data models, constructing advanced queries, techniques for working with text in databases, including regular expressions, and more.

Course 1 - Database Design and Basic SQL in PostgreSQL

In this course you will learn more about the historical design of databases and the use of SQL in the PostgreSQL environment. Using SQL techniques and common commands (INSERT INTO, WHERE, ORDER BY, ON DELETE CASCADE, etc) will enable you to create tables, column types and define the schema of your data in PostgreSQL. You will learn about data modeling and how to represent one-to-many and many-to-many relationships in PostgreSQL. Students will do hands-on assignments creating tables, inserting data, designing data models, creating relational structures and inserting and querying relational data in tables.

Course 2 - Intermediate PostgreSQL

This course covers a wide range of SQL techniques, beyond basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations in PostgreSQL. You will learn the specifics of aggregation, transactions, reading and parsing CSV files and inserting data into a database. You’ll also take a look at how PostgreSQL handles and indexes text data.

Specifically, students will do assignments that alter table schemas, create stored procedures, construct advanced queries, explore sorting and grouping query data, and techniques for working with text in databases including regular expressions.

Course 3 - JSON and Natural Language Processing in PostgreSQL

Within this course, you’ll learn about how PostgreSQL creates and uses inverted indexes for JSON and natural language content. We will use various sources of data for our databases, including access to an online API and spidering its data and storing the data in a JSON column in PostgreSQL. Students will explore how full-text inverted indexes are structured. Students will build their own inverted indexes and then make use of PostgreSQL built-in capabilities to support full-text indexes.

Course 4 - Database Architecture, Scale, and NoSQL with Elasticsearch

In this final course, you will explore database architecture, PostgreSQL, and various scalable deployment configurations. You will see how PostgreSQL implements basic CRUD operations and indexes, and review how transactions and the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) requirements are implemented.

You’ll learn to use Elasticsearch NoSQL, which is a common NoSQL database and a supplement to a relational database to high-speed search and indexing. We will examine Elasticsearch as an example of a BASE-style (Basic Availability, Soft State, Eventual Consistency) database approach, as well as compare and contrast the advantages and challenges associated with ACID and BASE databases.