Ask your boss for three days off and a trip to Boston at the end of January. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to lose all feeling in your toes, you’ll appreciate that a few friends and I are teaching a free three-day intensive course on SQL programming for database management systems, with a bit of Web and Android application development. It went well last year so we’re looking forward to an even better class this year. I think that people come away from this class with about as good a knowledge of SQL as folks who take a semester-long course. The intensive TA’d format is much more efficient than a traditional lecture-and-homework system.
Course web page: http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2012
Note that the class is free and open to the public.
Given that most large scale web properties now (Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Google) use NoSQL technologies such as BigTable or HBase, why not update the class content? There’s a huge gap in knowledge transfer between what these technologies can do and educated web developers. Maybe you can invite Daniel Abadi to give a lecture as well now that he’s in Cambridge.
David: Excellent idea and we do cover a bit about the NoSQL world at the end of the course. The RDBMS was a tremendous innovation in IT and is still the basis of most database apps (if not, as you point out, the most heavily used database apps). So the goal is to give people new to database management systems a solid grounding in the RDBMS and when it makes sense to use it. When Oracle files for Chapter 11 we can chuck the SQL material 🙂
That sounds really exciting. Where do you sign up?
“That sounds really exciting. Where do you sign up?”
On the course web page all it says is:
“It would be greatly appreciated if you’d register by emailing philg@mit.edu.”
I believe this is the process. Certainly Mr. Greenspun will let you know if I am wrong on this once you write to him.
I live a distance away, will this be recorded, or is this a in person class?
is there any confirmation that we’ve registered? I have an irrational fear of my e-mails being caught in a spam filter
Joe: I will try to confirm emails, but there is no absolute requirement to register. We expect a bunch of folks simply to show up on the first day (and we’ll have USB sticks for them preloaded with the virtual machine).
I guess it would be also very interesting to not just do SQL stuff but also seeing the alternatives. Who knows this days what kind of storages are still in use, probably even older than any SQL stuff ans still “mission critical”.. Maybe it would also be intersting to have a look at some OOBS and see how problematic ORM stuff really is….
Zak: Is this recorded? The course is hands-on in a TA’d lab environment. There wouldn’t be a lot to record other than teachers wandering around helping students and then some group discussion. I’m not a big believer in recorded lectures. If people could learn effectively by watching others, folks who watch 12 hours/day of public television would be the smartest humans on the planet. I guess that is a complicated way of saying “no”. But really this class would make less sense to record on video than most.
FDominicus: You want us to cover the database management systems that preceded the RDBMS? What percentage of the three-day course would you want to spend on IBM System/360 ISAM files?
Would you be broadcasting this over the web?
JC: Broadcasting? As noted above, the activity will mostly be people typing at laptops, occasionally getting help from the person sitting next to them or from a teacher. Not exactly HBO material…
@philg. Well this files are still in use. Maybe one does not talk about them because they are to “old” fashioned. But software is not an end in itself it should help to does your selling properly. I talked to on an owner of some actual used software and this is what they are using and it seems those things were/are used in big companies. Shouldn’t we appreciate what the elder ones have done?
Fdominicus: You didn’t answer the question. What percentage of the three-day intro course would you want to spend on IBM System/360 ISAM files? You’ve got a philosophical point of view that celebrating the achievements of the 1950s is important. But I’m a teacher with a practical challenge of a classroom full of people who want to learn SQL and when it is appropriate to use an RDBMS versus, say, Hadoop.
Fdominicus:
I think instead of telling philg what he should add into a three-day course, you should give a three-day course of your own that will teach everything a person should ever know about everything!
I might show up if it was conveniently nearby to me. 🙂
Well it should be mentioned and you should bring up at least one example. So overall not more than 1 hour. I have understood that it’s about SQL. But SQL is not alone and I’m sure it’s not the answer to any it related data holdding question.
well but it seems I have misunderstood the intentions. I though about introducing Databases to an audience, but I know realize that you meant at hands-on course. And of course it’s SQL, you should do SQL. I’m sorry that I did not realized that…