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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Database Management Essentials by University of Colorado System

4.6
stars
3,236 ratings

About the Course

Database Management Essentials provides the foundation you need for a career in database development, data warehousing, or business intelligence, as well as for the entire Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence specialization. In this course, you will create relational databases, write SQL statements to extract information to satisfy business reporting requests, create entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) to design databases, and analyze table designs for excessive redundancy. As you develop these skills, you will use either Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL to execute SQL statements and a database diagramming tool such as the ER Assistant or Visual Paradigm to create ERDs. We’ve designed this course to ensure a common foundation for specialization learners. Everyone taking the course can jump right in with writing SQL statements in Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL....

Top reviews

AS

Jun 28, 2020

Very good to every beginner out there trying to get into database management , tasks are really educational , only the normalization section needs more clarification. but as a total it is awesome

DD

Oct 20, 2016

Excellent introduction to DB Management, I learned everything that I wanted to learn from it. I highly recommend it and actually I am already enrolled to the next course of the specialization.

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701 - 725 of 769 Reviews for Database Management Essentials

By DAWN M

May 31, 2020

nice

By Ildikó L H

Sep 4, 2018

Good

By SRIKAKARLAPUDI V R K N A

Mar 6, 2022

4

By 221810303030 M V R

Dec 2, 2020

n

By Rohan S

Mar 8, 2016

Pros: The course content covers a lot of relevant topics on Database Management. Things like Basic SQL queries, Database Normalization, Conceptual and Logical databases, and making ER diagrams are covered in the course.

Cons: Prof Mannino is a bit robotic in his reading out of long sentences and the constant pace of talking. There is tons of repetition of sentences and words mere seconds after they were just spoken. The lectures seem to be a collection of bullet points.

The assignments and the peer review structure is really a low point. There's no specific grading rubric - so points allocation is random and based on your peer's assessment. I had many instances where my right answers were marked as wrong. There is nothing you can do to correct it. Moreover, the questions are iterative and thus the same apparent error carries on and you get multiple wrong scores.

Assignments need to be submitted in documents. Separate documents for each question !! At times, even a one-line answer needs to be in a separate document. Pictures of database diagrams need to be pasted in said documents. It was a bit frustrating to take screenshots all the time. Especially when you make a small correction, and have to take screenshots AGAIN, then paste it AGAIN, and upload AGAIN !!

Summary: Take the course for it's content, and use the assignments as good practice. Don't take the grading seriously. Also, focus on the content rather than the delivery by the professor, and you will still be able to get some value out of the course (and the specialization by extension)

By Brian M

May 4, 2016

The specialization is great, and the course breadth and topics described in each is equally good. For this course, however, I felt like I could have covered what was taught by myself with a book, i.e. I didn't feel like it was class room level engaging with the explanations.

I realized this is a one way MOOC, but I've taken courses off and on since they came out, and some others felt more interactive. This was more of here's a slide, I will read what's on the slide and explain some topics. The assignments were not bad, but definitely took more time than stated (just keep that in mind). The other thing that would help immensely is having TAs in the course. It's possible that they may get some later, but I've felt I learned/got feedback a lot more in courses with TAs.

That said, this is an excellent introduction to databases course, and there's not many of them out there. If I had to go it again, I would, and I also paid for getting the cert - if anything for career advancement and having it on your LinkedIn profile as a starter DB course.

By Matko V

Jul 10, 2016

Nice introductory course for database management. Assignments are challenging enough for beginners like me but I like that. If I'm already 'investing' my time into something I expect to learn something in return. This course gave me that kind of reciprocity. Course would benefit from radically different approach to video-lessons. Reading from power-point slides which are written in the same manner, have identical structure tends to become tedious after a while. Professor seems nice and knowledgeable but a bit more relaxed and/or engaging approach would be beneficial to many. Oh, and peer-reviewed grading, wherever possible, should be replaced with an auto-grader. That's not a critique, though. Not quite sure if it's even possible with this kind of material.

By Noel S

Oct 23, 2016

The material is fine but the course isn't taught well. The instructor tends to start talking immediately in subject jargon and abbreviations without first giving students an intro or explaining foundation material first. It seems a lot of material is left out of the lectures and slides on purpose and forces students to buy the instructor recommended text book (which is also authored by the instructor). After each lecture I'm forced to Google search a lot of what was mentioned before I even understood half of what the instructor was talking about. I didn't pay to listen to something that forces me to Google search everything.

By Thomas M

Jun 29, 2020

Assignments are well paced and easily digestible. There is an issue with assignment marking though- It seems that people are submitting answers that aren't there own work, presumably to get the certificate at the end. This may erode the perceived value of the certificate and therefore the value of the course. I also noticed that my assignments weren't marked to the highest standard either (Ie. I had mistakes and they weren't picked up by either marker). Rectify this and it may improve the legitimacy of the cert. Otherwise, I learned a lot! Thanks for a well designed course :)

By Jason L

May 7, 2016

Pros: Information is perfect for anyone looking at Business Intelligence as a career field, or already in the career field itself. I found the first week to challenge my on-the-job knowledge of a fuller set of concepts and general terminology.

Cons: The wording on the quiz questions, in some cases, seems much different than the PPT slides and the instructor's language. UPDATE: The wording is a significant challenge, even when advancing into the more complex topics. I have had many differences of opinions on the solutions based on wording in the requirements.

By Mads K G

Jan 9, 2023

In general the content was quite good.

It was a bit confusing though that the course changed while I was doing it. I have to say that it took me months and not weeks to complete, so that was part of why I experienced this confusion. I was happy that the change included the end of peer reviews, because most of the assignments I had to review were not real submissions.

Many of the documents with practice problems, assignments and solutions had several minor errors in them. It seemed like they hadn't been proofread.

By John E G S

Sep 28, 2020

The course is very good. However, I think the explanations could be better, with better examples.

Other thing, the subtitles in some ocassions have a lag respect to the image in the video. For people like me whose first language isn't english, we use the subtitles for a better understanding, the lag makes hinders our learning. Anyway, the course it's good to improve the knowledge in ERD's, queries, some tools and DBMS.

By David T

Mar 17, 2021

Instead i consider the content of the course is really great, i really frustated about the peer review system because some people just grade randomly take in count these if you want to take these course, because a greatly of the system of calification is peer review. Maybe they could consider to be more especific in the calification in the peer review, becouse the current system is very poor

By Cristy R

Jun 9, 2020

This course has great content, but the peer review process is lacking structure. I found that most of my peer reviews were marked less than 100 with no guidance of what errors I had made, just the comment 'good'. There were also many mistakes in the answer keys, but no clear way to notify the instructor of the issues there were found.

By Harshit S

Oct 17, 2017

Start of this course was very good. But after week 5, assignments became very repetitive and most of the assignments were based on developing an ERD in a tool called ER Assistant. I feel like this part could be covered in 2 weeks time and more stress could have been given to the SQL part of the course.

By Ajay J

Jun 12, 2019

Though content is good slides and delivery style could be better. More comparison with latest technologies can be provided. Need for more interactive quizzes so as to make it more relevant to fast-changing database world.

By STEVEN V D

May 16, 2018

Good course with a lot of hands-on assignments. Sometimes the lectures could be brought in a more intuitive way and were a bit 'over-theorized', which made relatively simple concepts seem more complex than they were.

By TylerOtto

Aug 16, 2016

Great content, horrible technical support from Coursera and the team that runs this program (since it is clearly obvious that Michael Mannino just recorded the videos and is not part of the class anymore).

By Gabriel S

Jan 7, 2022

Well structured course. The first lessons were much harder than the last ones. A good introduction to the basics but I'm not sure what I learned was up to date with the latest developments in the field.

By Jacob G

Mar 24, 2021

Decent broad intro to the concepts of data warehousing. Very long with intro to SQL that could easily have been slimmed down especially since this is considered an intermediate specialization.

By Xiyu F

Jun 15, 2016

The course was clear, I had difficulties to find course materials, especially examples were used in the video class, I wish they had been put in more obvious places.

By Manasa T

Nov 7, 2020

This is a good course for beginners out there. The examples make you understand the concept partially only. It tends to steer towards the boring side a little.

By Arushi D

May 3, 2020

The instructors were really helpful throughout the course. Although this was a basic course, but it was informative and very much helpful.

By Donatien L

Jan 27, 2016

Interesting, I would have liked to deepen SQL knowledge and practice. The conceptual parti seems a little bit too important.

By Saatvik N

Oct 29, 2020

Good for the most part, but some parts were covered too fast, and normalization was covered without adequate explanation