Relational Database Design For Beginners

No Prior Knowledge Needed, Even If You're a Total Beginner

By: Jessie Landon

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

If you’ve ever lost an afternoon fixing a broken Excel file, you know the pain. When Mara Delgado opened Rook & Pawn Café, a single spreadsheet handled all her member tracking. It worked perfectly. Then concurrent edits wiped out the renewal records. Next, a comma-separated list ruined her inventory queries. Eventually, a bad formula caused billing errors.
In Relational Database Design for Beginners, Jessie Landon shows you how to turn that chaos into a clean, scalable system. You don't need a computer science degree, and you don't need prior coding experience. This guide teaches core database architecture by following one continuous real-world case study.
Here is what we cover:

• Architecture: Set up your tables and columns. We break down exactly when to use natural keys versus surrogate keys and auto-incrementing integers.
• SQL Queries: Write SELECT statements, filter with WHERE, and sort the output. You will combine tables using INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, and FULL JOINs.
• Data Types: Pick the right formats. Learn why storing timestamps in UTC matters, and why using FLOAT for currency ruins your math with rounding errors.
• Diagrams: Map out 1:1, 1:N, and N:N relationships using junction tables and composite keys before you write any code.
• Normalization: Fix update and deletion anomalies by moving data through 1NF, 2NF, 3NF, and BCNF.
• Security: Speed up lookups with B-tree indexes, enforce access control with GRANT and REVOKE, and securely hash user passwords.