Intro to Databases Online Training

A database is a structured, digital collection of data. Databases are digital repositories organized for efficient storage, retrieval and management of certain types of data. Data gets stored in tables, each with rows and columns – this structured format helps ensure data integrity and security. Databases aren't just valuable tools for storing data, they make advanced data analysis possible, and they support complex apps that need fast access to data.

If your job involves working with data (even as a consumer or user of data, not an IT professional), taking a course on databases can be very beneficial. This course explains the terminology and concepts related to databases, as well as some of their basic functions. Knowing how to interact with and navigate a database can potentially improve job prospects for people who work in IT, business, research, finance, healthcare and more.

No, this course doesn't prepare you for any specific certification, but there are many data certs that this course could help you work toward. Generally, database certifications are tied to a specific product. For example, Microsoft offers a Database Administrator Associate for Azure, and AWS offers a Certified Data Engineer for AWS. This course can also help you toward earning CompTIA's Data+, which is a vendor-agnostic, early-career data analytics credential.

In the technical space, this course is a great introduction for IT professionals in software development, data analysis and data management. For non-technical professionals, this is a good course for students to take, especially if you're going into a field like computer science or IT. Entrepreneurs and small business owners should familiarize themselves with the different ways of managing data, so that they can understand important and costly future decisions.

By and large, there are three main types of database: relational, NoSQL and NewSQL. A relational database organizes data into tables and uses a language called SQL to manage the one-to-one relationships. NoSQL is designed for unstructured or semi-structured data and is quite a lot more flexible and scalable. NewSQL is a blend of the traditional SQL and NoSQL systems, meant for high-performance transactions that need scalability and distributed processing.