Fundamentals
SQL Fundamentals beginner Master SELECT, WHERE, JOIN types (INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, FULL), GROUP BY, HAVING, and aggregate functions. These are the bread and butter of every database interaction and getting them right means fewer round trips and less application-level data munging.
12h Fundamentals
Schema Design & Data Types beginner Learn to choose the right data types (TEXT vs VARCHAR, INTEGER vs BIGINT, TIMESTAMPTZ vs TIMESTAMP, UUID, ENUM, arrays) and design normalized schemas. Poor type choices haunt you forever once data is in production.
10h Performance
Indexes & Query Plans intermediate Understand B-tree, GIN, GiST, and hash indexes. Learn to read EXPLAIN ANALYZE output, spot sequential scans on large tables, and know when an index helps vs when it hurts. This is the single most impactful skill for database performance.
12h Fundamentals
Constraints & Referential Integrity intermediate Enforce data correctness at the database level with PRIMARY KEY, FOREIGN KEY, UNIQUE, CHECK, NOT NULL, and EXCLUDE constraints. Application-level validation is not enough; the database is your last line of defense against bad data.
8h Core
Transactions & Concurrency Control intermediate Understand ACID properties, isolation levels (READ COMMITTED, REPEATABLE READ, SERIALIZABLE), MVCC, row-level locking, and deadlock detection. Getting concurrency wrong causes subtle data corruption that is painful to debug in production.
12h Advanced SQL
Functions & Stored Procedures intermediate Write PL/pgSQL functions, procedures, and triggers. Know when to push logic into the database (atomic multi-table updates, audit logging) and when to keep it in application code. Overuse of stored procedures creates an unmaintainable second codebase.
10h Advanced SQL
Views, CTEs & Window Functions intermediate Use views for access control and query simplification, CTEs (WITH queries) for readable multi-step logic, and window functions (ROW_NUMBER, RANK, LAG, LEAD, running totals) for analytics queries that would otherwise require subqueries or application code.
10h Operations
Performance Tuning & Configuration advanced Tune shared_buffers, work_mem, effective_cache_size, and connection pooling (PgBouncer). Understand VACUUM, ANALYZE, table bloat, and the statistics collector. Configuration defaults ship conservative; real workloads need tuned settings.
12h Operations
Backup, Recovery & Replication advanced Set up pg_dump for logical backups, pg_basebackup for physical backups, point-in-time recovery with WAL archiving, and streaming replication for read replicas. Untested backups are not backups.
10h Mastery
Extensions & Advanced Features advanced Leverage PostgreSQL's extensibility with JSONB for semi-structured data, full-text search with tsvector/tsquery and GIN indexes, pg_trgm for fuzzy matching, PostGIS for geospatial queries, and foreign data wrappers. These features replace entire external services.
14h 