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Comment by aarondf | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN, I made this course :D

The course is a bit more than 7 hours long split over 64 videos.

I was always frustrated by the lack of intermediate database content, it seemed like it was mostly intro stuff, or straight to DBA level. So I read as many database books as I could, read through the official docs, and made this course specifically for application developers.

If yall have any feedback I'd love to hear it. I'll be making updates soon, but not before I take a nice long break from editing video.

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I’ve been using MySQL since 1998. I know the source code very well. I’ve designed large platforms with MySQL but I run postgres in production. I also wrote my own SQL engine.

This is very VERY well done. Kudos. I’m loving that we have a contender for mongo atlas with planetscale. Keep this kind of content coming and you’ll be the next snowflake.

Well that's a massive encouragement. Thank you so much!

This is well done! I can see that you've done your research: you've synthesized so much of the written material on MySQL (books, docs) in each lesson. Makes learning these concepts really accessible.

Thank you Justin, that was 100% my intent so that's encouraging to hear. There is a ton of good information, but man so much of it is irrelevant for application developers (as opposed to DBAs). Hopefully this fills that gap!

Thanks for making this Aaron. content looks so good! just in time for me. Unfortunately getting "Sorry Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here.", unsure what's up.

Uh oh! That shouldn't be the case. Where are you viewing from? And what browser? I might need to change some settings in Vimeo

Ah it's for sure some browser extension, it's playing fine in a FF private window. my bad. Will post back once I figure out what's causing it. Again, thanks for the awesome stuff!

Whew, that's a relief. Keep me posted if you find out it's on our side.

okay totally on my side: it was uMatrix :) https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Per-scope-switches#r...

Yeah Vimeo often requires a referrer header to be sent to prevent embedding the video on other websites.

This looks great!! Hopefully you can answer a couple questions for me.

You mention you're using TablePlus. Doesn't look like it has a free option. Can you recommend another similar database GUI tool so I can "code along"? And is there a database I can connect to and work with? Maybe you answer these at some point in the course, but I didn't see anything in the intro.

Also you mention this is for devs and not DBA's. Do you go over strategies for creating and "maintaining" a new db for a basic app? Or is this for a dev to work against a db that fully created and maintained by a DBA? I'm interested in using PlanetScale for hobby projects, so i'm currently trying to learn about not just using a db, but also being my own DBA (on a very small and basic scale).

Thank you for the course and any feedback on my questions.

Never used or heard about TablePlus, so don't know how it compares but I have been using https://dbeaver.io/ community edition for years now and it's my go to tool for interacting with relational databases. Highly recommended.

Hey there! Looks like the TablePlus question was answered below. I don't cover connecting to a database and coding along, but that's a good idea. I'll see if I can get the sample data up somewhere for y'all to download.

> Also you mention this is for devs and not DBA's. Do you go over strategies for creating and "maintaining" a new db for a basic app?

We do spend a lot of time talking about schema up front actually! What it takes to design good tables, what data types to use, and so on. I talk at the end of the schema section about migrations and how you can use those to keep your tables up to date as business requirements change over time.

I think if you use a hosted provider like PlanetScale, they (we) take care of a lot of the stuff that was traditionally the realm of the DBA, although maybe not all of it. I don't know exactly where to draw the DBA line to be honest.

Let me know if you have any other questions! Happy to help however I can.

Table Plus (Free Trial Version) What are the limitations of the free trial? The free trial is limited to 2 opened tabs, 2 opened windows, 2 advanced filters (filters are not available on the free TablePlus Windows) at a time. We can change the limitations without any notifications in the future releases.

Maybe i'm reading into their naming incorrectly. Free "trial" to me sounds like it's time based...as in after a week you can no longer use it and must buy. I'll give it a try.

It's not time based, only feature based, if you don't need lots of open tabs you can survive it it's only a bit annoying

Beekeeper Studio similarly has a (community edition) and it's GPLv3 licensed

thanks for the recommendation. will check it out

Quite difficult to review that many hours of video but from the syllabus there are probably some missing pieces, mainly stored procedures and triggers, yes i know MySQL sucks for that particular job and probably you didn't touch them because planetscale probably doesn't support them (not a planetscale dev but this is my wild guess).

Also didn't see any topic on choosing the right charset/collation for the right data and why.

Oh there are definitely missing pieces! I tried to cover the "meaty middle" of what application developers usually need to know. I did not cover stored procedures and triggers.

I did cover CTEs and windows, which are not yet supported by PlanetScale. I also covered foreign key constraints, which are not yet supported by PlanetScale.

As far as charset and collation, I cover that a bit in the "strings" video of the "Schema" section.

Let me know if you have any other feedback!

But then, most devs wouldn’t want their procedures inside the database anyway (with attendant lack of integration/versioning).

Since you call it intermediate level, would you recommend it for people who are already familiar with the basics of MySQL? Would someone who has no problem formulating a query to get any given result from a database and knows the basics of how to create indexes still learn anything new from this?

Yeah, I think you would still learn some good stuff! I go pretty deep into indexes and do some fun stuff with generated columns, windows, and CTEs. Based on your comment, you're the person I was hoping to hit! So if you do watch it, lemme know what you think

Nice work! Congrats on shipping it

this is great. Thank you so much for your effort. Really appreciate it. By the way , if you are starting a startup, will you use mysql or postresql and why assuming you are equally good at both ?

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