Databases are everywhere in today's world. They are the backends on virtually every commercial website. In industry and business, they help to keep track of people, goods, resources, and finances. Without solidly reliable high-performance databases, the modern society we all know would come to a halt almost immediately.
Many jobs in the world deal directly or indirectly with databases. Computer Science professionals are the people who build, maintain, and upgrade database systems around the world.
The concepts behind databases are worth knowing on their own merits. The fact that your bank account balance is correctly maintained, even if the bank's database fails in the middle of a transaction, is a tribute to the brilliant design and implementation of database internals by professionals like yourselves.
This course will introduce you to the major workhorse of database systems, the relational database, and its query language, SQL. In addition, you will learn about some of the latest novel architectures that go beyond the relational one.
In this course, you'll be using databases and creating a project that uses one or more database systems. Some of the most important industrial-strength database systems are available free. You can install them on your own computer: Windows, Mac, or Linux.