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Data & Databases Intermediate

Postgres for Application Developers

Indexes, transactions, JSONB and migrations, taught from the application developer seat.

Rated 5.0 out of 5 from 1 review 19 students

SN Created by Sofia Navarro

  • Last updated August 2026
  • English
  • 6h 45m of material
  • 51 lessons

What you will learn

8 concrete outcomes

Every bullet below is something you will have built, shipped or be able to explain by the time you finish the last lesson.

  • Choose the right index type and column order for a real query pattern
  • Read why the planner ignored the index you just created
  • Demonstrate each isolation level with two concurrent sessions
  • Use row locks and advisory locks without creating deadlocks
  • Model with JSONB where it helps and columns where it does not
  • Implement full-text search well enough to avoid a second system
  • Write migrations that do not lock a busy table for minutes
  • Configure connection pooling that survives a traffic spike

Course curriculum

7 modules · 51 lessons · 6h 45m of material

7 lessons running 52m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

8 lessons running 1h in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

8 lessons running 1h 4m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

7 lessons running 1h in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

7 lessons running 58m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

7 lessons running 56m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

7 lessons running 55m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

7 modules · 51 lessons

6h 45m total length

Requirements

Short list, and deliberately so. If you meet these you can start today.

  • Confident with SQL joins, grouping and subqueries
  • You build applications that talk to a database, in any language
  • Docker installed for the local PostgreSQL environment

About this course

Most application developers use PostgreSQL through an ORM and meet it properly only during an incident. Every topic is chosen because it changes a decision you make while writing application code.

Indexes come first and get the most time. B-tree, partial, expression, composite and covering indexes, the column order that decides whether a composite index is used at all, GIN indexes for JSONB and full-text search, and the cost of every index on your write path. You will create indexes, watch the planner ignore them, and work out why.

Transactions follow, treated as application behaviour rather than theory. Isolation levels demonstrated with two concurrent sessions side by side so you actually see a phantom read happen. Row locking, SELECT FOR UPDATE, deadlocks reproduced deliberately, advisory locks for coordination, and the connection and pooling behaviour that decides how your application survives a traffic spike.

The rest covers what applications lean on daily. JSONB with the operators and indexes that make it fast and the schema discipline that keeps it sane. Full-text search good enough that many teams never need a separate engine. Constraints and enums as correctness tools. Migrations that run on a live table without locking it for minutes, including the safe order for adding a column with a default, backfilling and adding a not-null constraint.

Topics covered

Frequently asked questions

Still unsure about something? Write to misteryjj100@gmail.com and a human answers, usually the same working day.

No. The course shows what common ORM patterns generate underneath, so you keep the convenience and lose the surprises.

No. Replication, backups and tuning at the server level are only mentioned where they change an application decision. The seat you sit in is the developer seat.

PostgreSQL 15 and later. Where a feature requires a newer version, the lesson says so and gives the older alternative.

Checkout is handled on our provider's secure payment page. The moment your payment clears we email your personal access link and access code to the address you used at checkout, and the same link appears in your account library. There is nothing to install and nothing to wait for.

Email misteryjj100@gmail.com within 14 days of your purchase, quote your order number, and we refund the full amount to your original payment method. No form to fill in and no questions about how much of the course you watched.

What students say

Reviews are written by people who bought this course. We publish the critical ones too.

5.0

Rated 5.0 out of 5

Course rating · 1 review

Rating distribution

  • 5 stars 100%
  • 4 stars 0%
  • 3 stars 0%
  • 2 stars 0%
  • 1 star 0%
  • NF

    Ndeye Fall

    Backend engineer

    Aug 2026
    Rated 5.0 out of 5

    Column order in a composite index

    I had three indexes doing absolutely nothing because the columns were in the wrong order for the queries we run. Twenty minutes of the index chapter, plus a plan I could finally read, and one endpoint went from painful to instant. Written squarely for people who build applications rather than administer servers, which is what I needed.

Your instructor

SN

Sofia Navarro

Python and data engineer

  • 231 students taught
  • 11 courses published
  • 4.5 instructor rating
  • Python
  • SQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • Data engineering

Sofia builds the pipelines that keep analytics teams honest, mostly Python on top of PostgreSQL under uncomfortable load. She teaches schema design, indexing and query planning against anonymised production datasets rather than toy tables, then wires the same data into pandas so the SQL and the Python halves stop being separate skills. Expect to spend real time reading execution plans and rather less time reading slides. She consults on migrations for teams that cannot afford downtime.

See every course by Sofia Navarro
$47 USD

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