Learning Journal week 4

This week marks the halfway point of the course, and looking back, I can already see how much I’ve learned about SQL and databases. Here are five key things I’ve taken away so far:

  1. I learned how to create tables using CREATE TABLE and define data types for each column. That helped me understand how important it is to plan out a table’s structure before adding data.

  2. I got more comfortable using SELECT statements to query data, especially with WHERE, ORDER BY, and GROUP BY. These commands make it possible to filter and organize results in useful ways.

  3. I practiced different types of joins—inner, left, right, and full—and how they connect data from multiple tables. This was confusing at first, but now I can see how powerful joins are for real-world queries.

  4. I learned about primary keys and foreign keys, and how they keep relationships consistent between tables. That made me realize how databases maintain order and prevent duplicate or missing links.

  5. I discovered how aggregate functions like COUNT, AVG, and SUM can summarize large amounts of data quickly. It’s interesting how much analysis you can do directly in SQL without needing another program.

Even with all this progress, I still have a few questions:

  1. When should I use a view instead of writing a query directly—are there best practices for deciding that?

  2. How do databases handle performance when working with millions of rows—what tools or indexing strategies matter the most?

  3. What’s the difference between SQL we use in class and the “dialects” like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle—how hard is it to switch between them in real jobs?

Overall, the course has been challenging but rewarding, and I’m excited to keep building on these concepts in the second half.

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