Normalization and keys, views and generated columns, triggers and functions, migrations, and SQL from application code — parameterized queries, injection, pooling, and transactions across a request — against PostgreSQL 18.
Why a flat table quietly corrupts itself, and how 1NF through BCNF is really just one rule — store every fact once — taught by breaking a denormalized bookshop table and then decomposing it. Plus when to denormalize on purpose. Run against PostgreSQL 18.
Primary and foreign keys recap, then the referential actions that decide a child's fate when its parent is deleted — CASCADE, SET NULL, RESTRICT, NO ACTION, and ON UPDATE — each triggered against a real parent/child pair. Plus composite keys, natural vs surrogate, and DEFERRABLE. Run against PostgreSQL 18.
CREATE VIEW as a stable, named interface over your schema — views over joins and aggregates, updatable views and WITH CHECK OPTION (with the insert it rightly rejects), and the proof that a view is a pure query rewrite with no storage of its own. Run against PostgreSQL 18.
Generated columns that derive a value and refuse to be written, DOMAINs that bottle up a type plus its CHECK for reuse, and ENUMs with their declaration-order sorting — each shown by the value it computes or the error it raises, including PostgreSQL 18's new virtual generated columns. Run against PostgreSQL 18.
How to make the database run your code automatically on every write — trigger functions, BEFORE versus AFTER, ROW versus STATEMENT, and NEW versus OLD — built into a real updated_at auto-touch and an audit log you can watch fill up, plus the honest case against them. Run against PostgreSQL 18.
Packaging logic inside the database — a plain SQL function, a full PL/pgSQL function with variables and loops, and a procedure that can COMMIT where a function cannot — plus the volatility label that decides whether the planner trusts your function enough to index it. Run against PostgreSQL 18.
How schemas actually change in production — forward and rollback scripts in version control, idempotent statements, wrapping DDL in a transaction (and the one command that refuses to be), the expand/contract pattern for zero-downtime column changes, and why ADD COLUMN ... DEFAULT is near-instant in modern Postgres. Run against PostgreSQL 18.
The oldest bug in web software, shown for real — a query built by gluing a string together, made to return all 5,000 customers and then to leak emails through a search box — followed by the fix that has always worked: parameterized queries that keep data as data, with the same attack now matching nothing. Run against PostgreSQL 18.
How an application actually talks to Postgres — why you pool connections instead of opening them, why each request gets its own short transaction, and the N+1 pattern that turns one query into a hundred. Run against PostgreSQL 18.
Giving the application a least-privilege login instead of superuser, proving a denied action, and letting the database filter rows per tenant with row-level security — one policy, same query, different results. Run against PostgreSQL 18.
A short capstone that hardens the bookshop with everything the track taught — a constraint that removes a bug class, an index that turns a scan into a lookup, a view as an interface, a policy that isolates tenants — then closes all four series. Run against PostgreSQL 18.