Databases Intro Prep

Overview

It’s finally time to start thinking about organizing your data better than just a giant list or dictionary! Today we’ll be getting started with putting your data into a database and using a model to access it.

Basic Learning Objectives

Before class, you should be able to:

• Identify basic SQL commands
• Identify how to create a database table using postgres

Advanced Learning Objectives

After class, you should be able to:

• Create a postgres database and load data into it
• Execute basic SQL commands on your database

Readings

To achieve the basic learning objectives, you should read the following:

• The following sections of the SQLBolt tutorial:
  • Intro to SQL
  • Lesson 1: SELECT queries 101
  • Lesson 2: Queries with constraints
  • Lesson 3: Queries with constraints part 2
  • Lesson 4: Filtering and Sorting
  • Lesson 16: Creating tables
  • SQL Create Table, note that Postgres has some small differences, so here is the Postgres Data Types for future reference
• Other sections of the tutorial may be useful reference depending on what you want to do for your project

Checks

Submit your answer to the following on Moodle:

• What does the following command (likely) do?

    SELECT * FROM dragons WHERE age>6 ORDER BY age DESC;
  

• You have many exisiting functions that access your data in your team project. Identify one that you can turn into a SQL query. What is the function currently doing (at a high level) and what would the query be?

You should also be able to answer the relevant exercises on W3Schools