Caleb Curry's Database design course

I wanted to create a mini project where i designed from start to end by myself since during my time in the bootcamp, I always worked with others on all of my projects. For past week, I started studying algorithm because I just finished up my bootcamp courses about a month ago, and took two weeks to prepare for an korea engineer exam(?) and finally had some time to study things I wanted to study which is algorithms. But I realized I first need to find a job first to improve my skills as a developer. Because having first hand experience inside the field is much much better than doing mini projects and studying from books by myself. So my goal is to first find a job that suits my needs and then start studying things I want to study again. 

And as a starting junior developer, the most important thing is basic knowledge of the field I am trying to be hired for which is web developer or backend developer. The next important thing is obviously a portfolio. As I was creating my portfolio, I realized I never did a project by myself so this eventually made me me want start a mini shopping mall project. 

I started to plan out what kind of features and how site was going to be by benchmarking other shopping mall sites and as I was planning out the database structure of the site I was going to create, I realized I did not know a lot of things that was required to create a functional and proper database. 

And the obvious place to go to is youtube. Found a course by Caleb Curry, teaching from the basics and up to joins. The course does not talk about specific sql commands but rather on how to design a functional database which is exactly what I needed. 

I had the basic knowledge of database structure design because I had done projects before. But figured I would tie up some loose ends and the course was the perfect fit. Here are thigns I learned which I thought was pretty useful :

 

1. definition of a surrogate key and natural key and there differences.

previously when designing a database, I was taught to add an id for every table I created but was not taught the reason for doing such a procedure. I was setting up a surrogate key. surrogate keys are unique identified keys like natural key but does not have real value like a natural key. natural key is a unqiue identified key that already exists in the table like a username. 

 

2. normal forms

I studied the concept of normal forms when I was preparing for the korea engineer exam but did not know specifically how to apply to a table. 1nf assigns an atomic value for each attributes. 2nf removes all partial relations. 3nf make sure non keys are dependent to other non keys

 

3. joins

inner joins, left joins, right joins, outer joins and very new to me a self join

 

I want to keep track of what I have studied like this from now on. If the course is in Korean, I will post it in korean with english comments and if and probably mostly is in english then i will post it in english