This course will introduce the basics of relational data modeling, querying data with SQL and how to interact with remote databases or public data repositories. Relational databases and SQL are technologies that may appear as "old fashioned", certainly if you heard about all the cool stuff that NoSQL technologies do. This course will show that the core concepts are still alive and used in surprising new situations that will help you during your research career. For instance, a tailored version of SQL called SPARQL enables to query and merge datasets together in a linked data repository. Another possibility is to use SQL with HADOOP or SPARK to conduct computing intensive analyses. These recent applications of SQL make it a valuable, and easy as we will see, language to learn and apply in all kind of situations that you will encounter when conducting research with data.
Note for those who followed the Research Data Management workshop at Utrecht University: this course will teach you how to draw "multi-level data models" (Section 1.2 of the workshop), and query relational or linked data.