Day 1: Creating a Database, Creating And Modifying Tables.

In my previous learning experiences, I used a pre-configured SQL development environment to run SQL queries. These tutorials did not involve creating databases, tables, or connecting to databases to view their contents.

Currently, I'm working on a guided project through freeCodeCamp, using PostgreSQL. I’m using Gitpod to launch a PostgreSQL environment within VSCode, where I’ve connected to a PostgreSQL instance and created a database with tables.

Keywords I learned on Day 1 (placeholders in brackets should be replaced with actual values):

• CREATE DATABASE <database_name>;
• CREATE TABLE <table_name>;
• ALTER TABLE <table_name> ADD COLUMN <column_name> DATATYPE;
• ALTER TABLE <table_name> DROP COLUMN <column_name> DATATYPE;
• ALTER TABLE <table_name> ADD FOREIGN_KEY(<column_name) REFERENCES <table_name>(column_name);
• \l to view databases
• \d <table_name> to view table structure
• PRIMARY KEY

Day 2: Creating And Modifying Tables. Bash Scripting: Automating Record Entry to Tables.

Today, I continued working on creating and modifying tables. I added data to the tables from the courses.csv and students.csv files.

Initially, I thought manually adding this data would be a nightmare. Thankfully, the course anticipated this and provided instructions for creating a bash script to automate the process of importing data from the CSV files.

After completing part of the script, I tested it using a sample CSV file (courses_test.csv), which contains a subset of the data from courses.csv, to avoid running through the entire list.

I found bash scripting quite interesting because it’s different from other programming languages I’ve learned so far. The syntax for variables, conditional statements, and conditions in bash differ from what I’m used to.

The bash script connects to the PostgreSQL environment and uses a nested do if-then loop to add data to the database. It checks if an ID exists, and if not, it adds the record to the database.