Code Platoon Week Four – SQL and Working With Databases

Programming languages come and go. Frameworks come and go. SQL (structured query language) is forever. Students will spend week four learning how to read and write data to Postres, a modern database, using SQL. Students will learn the basics of database design and how to incorporate a database into their app.

Working With a Database

Saving data to a file is fine for small applications that have limited functionality, but most modern web applications use a relational database. We’ll spend all of week four learning the tools and practices that will allow students to interact with data in much more dynamic and complex ways. The first step will be learning how to create and talk to a database. Databases have their own languages for accessing and manipulating the information they hold. By far the most popular, and the one students will focus on throughout their time at Code Platoon, is SQL. Students will learn how to set up a Postgres database from scratch. They’ll work on building out a schema and start to read and write data, all using SQL.

Database Design

The design and structure of a database can have a huge impact on an application’s performance. Databases need to be adaptable, scalable as an application grows, and changeable as new features get added. They also need to be secure. At Code Platoon, we teach all the skills students will need to build a database that is effective and efficient, and we’ll discuss best practices when it comes to how to store sensitive data like passwords and other personal user information. The highlight of this week will be a day-long database workshop hosted by Hashrocket. Hashrocket is a web consultancy in Chicago / Jacksonville Beach known for creating quality software. One of the presenters will be Jake Worth, a US Army veteran-turned-programmer.

ORM

SQL is a powerful tool but it can get tedious to write. Most languages have something called an object relational mapper or ORM. Python’s ORM is called Alchemy. Think of it as a way to talk to your database using the Python programming language. ORMs help developers read and write to the database more quickly and efficiently. They also cut down on code you have to write.

By the end of week four, students will have most of the nuts and bolts necessary to build their own web applications. We’ll spend week five looking at how to structure and style web pages before jumping into our first framework, Django, where all of the pieces from prior weeks will finally come together.