This document lists the topics to be discussed in the first session of the workshop, linking out to the databases tutorial.

Topics:

• Working with large datasets: memory and disk
• Overview of databases
• StackOverflow example database

The database we’ll work with as our example is data on questions and answers on the Stack Overflow code discussion website from 2016. We don’t have the full text of the questions or the answers, but we do have:

• the question title and date posted,
• the date posted for each answer,
• some information about how popular the questions and answers were,
• information about the users posting questions or answers, and
• the topics (tags) associated with each question.

Each question may have zero or more answers and each question has one or more tags indicating what the question is above.

• Database schema and normalization
• Accessing a database from languages like R and Python
• Basic SQL syntax