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Relational data modeling

Design tables from the questions a business asks, then migrate them without downtime.

Rated 4.71,490 reviews15,800 learners

Taught by Tomás Oliveira, verified instructorStaff engineer · payments · Meridian Lab
Length
7 weeks at 5 hours a weekAt your own pace, or in a live cohort
Credential
Earn a course certificateIssued by Meridian Lab
Language
Taught in EnglishWith subtitles in 12 languages
Tutor
An AI tutor in every lessonIt answers from the lesson on screen

$99once, yours to keep

Or in Waypoint Plus for $29 a month

Enroll for $99Start lesson one free

Your money back within 30 days

Start

Hours you have a week
5 hours

Cohorts · live Thursdays

About this course

For engineers who own a schema that other teams read from and nobody dares to change. You work in Postgres throughout and rehearse every migration first on a production-sized copy of the data.

Skills you practice

Syllabus

  • 5 modules

    Ends on the project

  • 17 lessons

    7 to 18 min each

  • 3 h 34 min of video

    Pause to ask the tutor

  • 2 free lessons

    Watch before you pay

  • 4 quizzes

    25 questions in all

  • 1 project

    Reviewed by Tomás's team

    • 1.2Entities, relationships and cardinality9 min
    • 1.3Drawing the model before writing DDL17 min
    • Quiz · 8 questions6 min
    • 2.2Foreign keys, and what cascades16 min
    • 2.3Check constraints as documentation12 min
    • 2.4Unique indexes that enforce a rule15 min
    • Quiz · 6 questions6 min
    • 3.1Where duplication turns into bugs16 min
    • 3.2Denormalizing on purpose8 min
    • 3.3History tables and effective dates12 min
    • Quiz · 5 questions10 min
    • 4.1Expand, then contract17 min
    • 4.2Backfilling a column on a large table18 min
    • 4.3Renaming without breaking the readers11 min
    • 4.4Rehearsing on a production-sized copy12 min
    • Quiz · 6 questions6 min
    • 5.1Views for the reporting team11 min
    • 5.2Row-level security9 min
    • 5.3A schema people can search7 min
    • Project · Take an order system multi-currency with no downtime4 hours

What the price covers

In the price

  • 17 video lessons, 3 h 34 min in all
  • The AI tutor beside every lesson
  • 4 quizzes, graded as you answer
  • A project reviewed by Tomás's team
  • A course certificate when you finish
  • Transcripts in 12 languages

Not in it

  • Answers the tutor writes for you
  • Live reviews outside a cohort
  • One-to-one mentoring
  • A job guarantee

Your instructor

Tomás Oliveira, verified instructor

Staff engineer · payments

Rating
4.9
Learners
106.8K
Courses
4
  • 13 years in software

    I build payments software for four million merchants.

  • Career highlight

    I moved our ledger to Postgres with zero downtime.

  • How Tomás teaches

    The courses grew out of my weekly code reviews.

Open Tomás Oliveira's profile

Reviews, rated4.71,490 reviews

Overall rating

  • 5 stars, 79% of reviews
  • 4 stars, 14% of reviews
  • 3 stars, 4% of reviews
  • 2 stars, 1% of reviews
  • 1 star, 1% of reviews
  • Clarity

    4.7

  • Pace

    4.5

  • Practice

    4.8

  • Tutor

    4.9

  • Feedback

    4.7

  • Value

    4.7

  • Yusuf K.Junior developer

    4 weeks agoFinished

    The tutor asked what I thought the error meant before saying anything. Annoying on day one; by week three I was doing it unasked.

  • Grace W.Career changer

    4 months agoFinished

    I finished with a repository I could show in interviews. Two interviewers asked about the project before they asked about anything else on my résumé, and one of them had read the tests. I had spent eight years in retail management, and this was the first thing I had ever built that a stranger could download, install and run on their own machine.

  • Diego F.Backend developer

    2 weeks agoFinished

    The exercises break things on purpose. Fixing the failing run in module three taught me more than any of the lectures I have sat through.

  • Pete L.Senior engineer

    2 months agoFinished

    Too basic for me. The last module is what I came for, and it is short.

  • Mei C.Software engineer

    1 month agoFinished

    Tomás reviews the project the way a senior colleague would: short comments, each pointing at one line of your code and asking why it is there.

  • Nadia B.DevOps engineer

    2 months agoFinished

    I use something from this course every week. The notes on failure paid for it.

6 of 1,490 reviews

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