Description

This course is one of five self-paced courses on the topic of Databases, originating as one of Stanford's three inaugural massive open online courses released in the fall of 2011. The original "Databases" courses are now all available on edx.org. This course is broad and practical, covering indexes, transactions, constraints, triggers, views, and authorization, all in the context of relational database systems and the SQL language. This course builds on concepts introduced in Databases: Relational Databases and SQL and is recommended for learners seeking to advance their understanding and use of relational databases.

  • The Indexes and Transactions section of this course covers two important features of database systems from the application-builder's perspective: indexing for increased performance, and transactions for concurrency control and failure recovery.
  • The Constraints and Triggers section of this course explains key, referential integrity, and "check" constraints, followed by comprehensive coverage of database triggers.
  • The Views and Authorization section of this course provides extensive coverage of how database views can be created, used, and updated, and introduces standard techniques for authorization in relational databases.

What you will learn

Databases are incredibly prevalent -- they underlie technology used by most people every day if not every hour. Databases reside behind a huge number of websites; they're a crucial component of telecommunications systems, banking systems, video games, and just about any other software system or electronic device that maintains some amount of persistent information. In addition to persistence, database systems provide a number of other properties that make them exceptionally useful and convenient: reliability, efficiency, scalability, concurrency control, data abstractions, and high-level query languages. Databases are so ubiquitous and important that computer science graduates frequently cite their database class as the one most useful to them in their industry or graduate-school careers.