Introduction

Terms defined: database, database management system, NoSQL database, relational database management system, table

What This Is

• Notes and working examples that instructors can use to perform a lesson
  • Do not expect novices with no prior SQL experience to be able to learn from them
• Musical analogy
  • This is the chord changes and melody
  • We expect instructors to create an arrangement and/or improvise while delivering
  • See Teaching Tech Together for background

Scope

• intended audience
  • Rachel has a master’s degree in cell biology and now works in a research hospital doing cell assays.
  • She learned a bit of R in an undergrad biostatistics course and has been through the Carpentries lesson on the Unix shell.
  • Rachel is thinking about becoming a data scientist and would like to understand how data is stored and managed.
  • Her work schedule is unpredictable and highly variable, so she needs to be able to learn a bit at a time.
• prerequisites
  • basic Unix command line: cd, ls, * wildcard
  • basic tabular data analysis: filtering rows, aggregating within groups
• learning outcomes
  1. Explain the difference between a database and a database manager.
  2. Write SQL to select, filter, sort, group, and aggregate data.
  3. Define tables and insert, update, and delete records.
  4. Describe different types of join and write queries that use them to combine data.
  5. Use windowing functions to operate on adjacent rows.
  6. Explain what transactions are and write queries that roll back when constraints are violated.
  7. Explain what triggers are and write SQL to create them.
  8. Manipulate JSON data using SQL.
  9. Interact with a database using Python directly, from a Jupyter notebook, and via an ORM.

Setup

• Download the latest release
• Unzip the file in a temporary directory to create:
  • ./db/*.db: the SQLite databases used in the examples
  • ./src/*.*: SQL queries, Python scripts, and other source code
  • ./out/*.*: expected output for examples

Background Concepts

• A database is a collection of data that can be searched and retrieved
• A database management system (DBMS) is a program that manages a particular kind of database
• Each DBMS stores data in its own way
  • SQLite stores each database in a single file
  • PostgreSQL spreads information across many files for higher performance
• DBMS can be a library embedded in other programs (SQLite) or a server (PostgreSQL)
• A relational database management system (RDBMS) stores data in tables and uses SQL for queries
  • Unfortunately, every RDBMS has its own dialect of SQL
• There are also NoSQL databases like MongoDB that don’t use tables

Connecting to Database

sqlite3 db/penguins.db

• Not actually a query: starts an interactive session with the database in db/penguins.db
• Alternative: provide a single query on the command line sqlite3 database “query“
• Or put query in file and run sqlite3 database < filename
• Note: the penguins database contains two tables
  • penguins is all the Palmer Penguins data
  • little_penguins is a subset used in our first few queries to keep output readable

To disconnect from an interactive database session, type Control-D or .quit on a line of its own. You may need to type a semi-colon ; to close any unfinished query before SQLite will recognize your attempt to escape.

Acknowledgments

This tutorial would not have been possible without:

• Andi Albrecht’s sqlparse module
• Dimitri Fontaine’s The Art of PostgreSQL
• David Rozenshtein’s The Essence of SQL (now sadly out of print)

I would also like to thank the following people for spotting issues, making suggestions, or submitting changes:

• Yanina Bellini Saibene
• Phillip Cloud
• Zoe Daniels
• Conor Flynn
• Andy Goldberg
• Jay Graves
• Sam Hames
• Adam Hawkes
• Robert Kern
• Konstantinos Kitsios
• Olivier Leroy
• Kevin Marshall
• Roy Pardee
• Manos Pitsidianakis
• Daniel Possenriede
• Adam Rosien
• Thomas Sandmann
• Simon Willison