Course Description
You’ve already used SQL to query data from databases. But did you know that there's a lot more you can do with databases? You can model different phenomena in your data, as well as the relationships between them. This gives your data structure and consistency, which results in better data quality. In this course, you'll experience this firsthand by working with a real-life dataset that was used to investigate questionable university affiliations. Column by column, table by table, you'll get to unlock and admire the full potential of databases. You'll learn how to create tables and specify their relationships, as well as how to enforce data integrity. You'll also discover other unique features of database systems, such as constraints.
In this chapter, you'll create your very first database with a set of simple SQL commands. Next, you'll migrate data from existing flat tables into that database. You'll also learn how meta-information about a database can be queried.
Enforce data consistency with attribute constraints
After building a simple database, it's now time to make use of the features. You'll specify data types in columns, enforce column uniqueness, and disallow NULL values in this chapter.
Uniquely identify records with key constraints
Now let’s get into the best practices of database engineering. It's time to add primary and foreign keys to the tables. These are two of the most important concepts in databases, and are the building blocks you’ll use to establish relationships between tables.
Glue together tables with foreign keys
In the final chapter, you'll leverage foreign keys to connect tables and establish relationships that will greatly benefit your data quality. And you'll run ad hoc analyses on your new database.

Timo Grossenbacher
Project Lead Automated Journalism at Tamedia
Timo Grossenbacher is a project lead for automated journalism at Swiss publisher Tamedia. Prior to that, he used to be a data journalist working with the Swiss Public Broadcast (SRF), where he used scripting and databases for almost
every data-driven story he published. He also teaches data journalism at the University of Zurich and is the creator of
rddj.info – resources for doing data journalism with R. Follow him at
grssnbchr on Twitter or visit his
personal website.
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