Coursera: Managing Big Data with MySQL Review

Managing Big Data with MySQL is the fourth and final course in Duke University's Excel to MySQL: Analytic Techniques for Business specialization offered through Coursera. The 5-week course focuses on teaching students how to make relational database queries. Unlike some database courses that delve into details concerning database construction and theory, this course is all about the practical use of databases from the perspective of a business analyst. The first week introduces the concept of relational databases, entity relationship diagrams and schema, while the remainder of the course covers querying from simple select statements to summary functions, grouping, joins and subqueries. You don't need any particular background to take this course and it could be taken in isolation from the rest of the specialization. Grading is based on 4 week-end multiple-choice quizzes.

Weekly course content is divided into several lessons that typically involve watching a short video segment and then working through an exercise set in MySQL or Teradata, two relational databases used in the course. The lecture content is high quality but after the first week, you'll be spending most of your time working on exercises rather than watching videos. In fact, some lessons don't have video lectures at all: the written exercises are really the core of the course. The MySQL exercises are contained in Jupiter notebooks--interactive text and code documents--that let you read instructions and play around with code in the same place. The exercises provide plenty of opportunity to drill SQL queries and build SQL vocabulary. The answers to exercise questions are provided in PDFs (they are ungraded), which means you can skip ahead if you don't need more practice. Considering each week after the first has at least 3 exercises sets plus a quiz, each of which could take a few hours to complete in their entirety, consulting the answer keys frequently is recommended to keep things moving along at a reasonable pace.

At the end of each week after the first you'll do a final exercise set using Teradata and answer multiple choice quiz questions based on your results. You use the same real-world data set for each quiz--product information from Dillard's department stores—helping you build some familiarity with the data by the end of the course. The final week of the course doesn't cover any new material: it just contains the final quiz.

Managing Big Data with MySQL is a great course for learning practical relational database querying skills with plenty of exercises that let you interact with real-life data sets. The focus on drilling ungraded exercises combined with sparing use of lectures after the first week does, however, make the course feel impersonal. It plays out more like a collection of training materials than the sort of university-style course you may expect from Coursera.


I give Managing Big Data with MySQL 4.5 out of 5 stars: Great.