Please see below the discussion in response to the original question asked and respond as a peer using 150 or more words.

Original Question:   As your study in this course draws to a close, it is important to reflect on new levels of understanding, skills, and knowledge that you developed as a result of your efforts throughout this course. It is particularly important to reflect on the course outcomes (what you were intended to learn in this course). 

Peer Response:  

I learned a lot during this course in regard to databases and how there is a process to optimize them to work the most efficiently.  This started with relational algebra and how it is the theoretical foundation that database management programming languages are built on and how at the base level it is intended to work.  Then transitioning to relational modeling and database design and how this essential builds the blueprint for the database needed based on the business rules of the company it is being built for.  The modeling process helps the designer to figure out how many tables are needed based on the attributes and how they relate to each other.  This leads us to normalizing which is basically scrutinizing and removing the dependencies of the attributes to the primary keys and making as many separate tables as needed to accomplish this.  The normalizing process is the key to eliminating data redundancies, multiple locations for similar data to update, and other anomalies that may occur when running queries on the database. 

The most enjoyable part of this class for me was actually writing “select, from, where” statements, creating tables, and populating the tables with data in SQL Live.  Also, running multiple different queries on the database to understand how you can isolate and pull only the specific data you are looking for.