I successfully completed this course with a 100.0% mark. It was quite broad and covered a range of topics somewhat superficially, from Relational Databases, their relation to Big Data Management Systems, the various alternatives that exist for processing different types of big data. As with the first course, there were a lot of new names to grasp and connections to be made between the things they represented. The assignments were straightforward and involved running a few specific command-line tools and spreadsheet commands to process data and carry out some basic analysis just to get a feel for data tables and how one might go about extracting information from them. The final assignment involved completing an incomplete relational database design for a game. In my opinion, its goals could have been more precise, its connection to the course material more clear, and being a peer-graded assignment the evaluation criteria more well-defined. Quite a few learners seem to have lost out due to someone else not being able to evaluate their assignment properly due to the latter shortcoming. And as usual, here’s the certificate that I was awarded on completing the course.

It looks like the upcoming courses in this specialisation contain more practical and hands-on exercises, so looking forward to that in the coming weeks!