Hey everyone, welcome to Moving Beyond Spreadsheets, An Introduction to Databases. In this course, we'll discuss some fundamental concepts of data management with a particular focus on understanding the differences between, using spreadsheets to manage your data, and databases to manage the same data. We'll look at some specific examples to understand when spreadsheets makes sense. Perhaps you're already using them, perhaps you're gonna keep using them, or when it makes sense to switch over to a database, which has a little more setup, but as sometimes a much better option to managing your complex data set.

Specifically, this course aims to give students a practical hands-on introduction to database concepts. In addition, we'll gain an understanding of how to select the right database, for a particular application, because there are so many of them. And finally, we will go through the basics of setting up, an RDS instance on Amazon.

As this is an intermediate course, students taking it should have a basic understanding of some simple data structures such as comma-separated values or more colloquial CSVs, as well as an understanding of cloud concepts. You don't need to be an expert on the cloud, but you should have an understanding of what it means to host something in the cloud and some awareness, of what the different providers, such as Amazon, Google, and Azure bring to the table. Finally, some high-level familiarity with databases in general, such as their function and application, are strongly suggested in order to get the most from this course. And finally, if you're a little on the fence if this course is for you, if you're looking to gain a practical understanding of how databases work, and a holistic view of data management concepts, along with starting to take control and understanding your data.

So if you have a data problem, and you're considering a database, this course is ideal for you. And just to briefly introduce myself, my name is Chris Gambino. I'm one of the architects at Calculated Systems and one of the co-founders, and although I'm presenting today, I can't take all the credit. The team really put this together. And just so you know a little bit about our experience. I personally was a big data engineer at Google. The team has experienced from Hortonworks with Hadoop with and streaming hundreds of millions of events per day of social media data, being presented at trade shows, such as Battle of the Quants, which is an awesome name.