Transportation Data Webinar
A Brief Introduction to Relational Databases & SQL
The world is awash in data, and the data available to transportation analysts and planners is growing by the minute. With this rapid growth, traditional data analysis tools may no longer be effective. Relational databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and Oracle are one tool that can be used to manage and query large data sets. In this webinar, we give a brief introduction to relational databases and SQL — the language that is used to communicate with relational databases. Participants will learn the key structures of relational databases (relations, keys and types), and will learn how to write simple SQL queries. We will practice writing SQL queries during the training. Additional resources will be provided for participants who wish to continue practicing their new SQL skills after the training. Join us to learn a bit more about how to manage those large data sets!
This event is eligible for 1.5 hours of professional development.
Link to the recorded webinar, slides, and certificate is found here.
Key Learning Takeaways:
- Understand relational database schema: relations, keys and types
- Write single and multiple table SQL queries (e.g. SELECT, JOIN, WHERE)
- Write SQL aggregate queries (e.g. COUNT, SUM)
- Understand the range of queries possible to write with SQL
The Speaker
Dr. Kristin Tufte has over 25 years experience in data architecture and data management system design and performance and 15 years experience in transportation data management. Dr. Tufte directs PORTAL — a 17TB archive of freeway, transit and traffic signal data which provides visualizations of performance measures for transportation professionals. Dr. Tufte was on teams that implemented two groundbreaking data management systems — a parallel geo-spatial data management system sold to NCR corporation and a data stream management system — technologies from both systems are now commonplace in the data management industry. In addition to her research work, Dr. Tufte teaches data management courses at Portland State University, including an Introduction to Databases course on which this training is based.