📌 Roadmap for RDBMS & SQL Mastery
1. Fundamentals of RDBMS
What is a Database? Why use RDBMS?
Difference between DBMS and RDBMS
Data models (Relational, Hierarchical, Network, NoSQL vs SQL)
Database Schema & Instances
Keys: Primary, Foreign, Candidate, Composite, Super keys
Constraints: NOT NULL, UNIQUE, CHECK, DEFAULT
ER (Entity-Relationship) Model
Normalization (1NF, 2NF, 3NF, BCNF)
Denormalization & when to use
ACID Properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability)
2. SQL Basics
SQL vs NoSQL
Data Types in SQL (INT, VARCHAR, DATE, DECIMAL, BOOLEAN, etc.)
DDL (Data Definition Language)
o CREATE, ALTER, DROP
DML (Data Manipulation Language)
o INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
DQL (Data Query Language)
o SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY, LIMIT, DISTINCT
DCL & TCL (GRANT, REVOKE, COMMIT, ROLLBACK, SAVEPOINT)
3. SQL Joins & Subqueries
Types of Joins
o INNER JOIN
o LEFT JOIN / RIGHT JOIN
o FULL OUTER JOIN
o SELF JOIN
o CROSS JOIN
Subqueries
o Single-row subquery
o Multi-row subquery (IN, ANY, ALL)
o Correlated subquery
EXISTS vs IN
4. SQL Clauses & Functions
GROUP BY, HAVING
Aggregate Functions (COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX)
Scalar Functions (UPPER, LOWER, LENGTH, ROUND, NOW, DATE_FORMAT)
CASE WHEN (Conditional expressions)
COALESCE, NULLIF
String Functions (CONCAT, SUBSTR, REPLACE)
Date & Time Functions (NOW, DATEDIFF, EXTRACT)
5. Advanced SQL
Window Functions (OVER, PARTITION BY, ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK)
CTE (Common Table Expressions) & RECURSIVE CTE
Views (CREATE VIEW, DROP VIEW)
Indexes (Clustered, Non-clustered, Unique Index)
Stored Procedures & Functions
Triggers
Transactions (COMMIT, ROLLBACK, SAVEPOINT)
Locking & Concurrency (Shared lock, Exclusive lock, Deadlocks)
6. Database Design & Optimization
Schema design principles
Query optimization
o Execution plans
o Index optimization
o Avoiding SELECT *
Partitioning & Sharding basics
Denormalization for performance
Caching strategies
7. System Design & Real-World Databases
CAP Theorem (Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance)
OLTP vs OLAP databases
Data Warehousing concepts
Star & Snowflake schema
SQL vs NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis comparison)
8. SQL for Interviews (DSA in SQL)
Write queries for:
o Top N (Nth highest salary, etc.)
o Duplicate detection
o Running totals
o Moving averages
o Employee-manager hierarchy queries
o String pattern matching
Case Studies:
o E-commerce DB (orders, customers, products)
o Social Media DB (followers, likes, comments)
9. Hands-On Practice Sources
📘 Learning
W3Schools SQL Tutorial
Khan Academy SQL
Mode SQL Tutorial
🏆 Problem Solving
LeetCode SQL
HackerRank SQL
StrataScratch SQL
GeeksforGeeks SQL Problems
📂 Interview Prep Sheets (India)
Striver’s SQL & DBMS Interview Sheet
Love Babbar’s Database Questions
GFG 100 SQL Interview Questions