Start by watching Michael Stonebraker's Turing Award lecture, he will give you the lowdown and inspiration: https://youtu.be/BbGeKi6T6QI https://youtu.be/BbGeKi

Start by watching Michael Stonebraker's Turing Award lecture, he will give you the lowdown and inspiration: https://youtu.be/BbGeKi6T6QI https://youtu.be/BbGeKi6T6QI Start with relational, understand why it is the reference architecture, and from there the tradeoffs involved and what other architectures bring to the table (columnar, streaming, object, in-memory, array, distributed, blockchain, nosql, etc) To really understand why you should start with relational, read Stonebraker's classic paper: "What goes around comes around": https://people.cs.umass.edu/~yanlei/courses/CS691LL-f06/papers/SH05.pdf https://people.cs.umass.edu/~yanlei/courses/CS691LL-f06/pape... It will teach you database evolution history so that you don't end up reinventing the wheel. Stonebraker's MIT course: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-830-database-systems-fall-2010/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... There are a few lectures of this course in youtube, not by him: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfciLKR3SgqOxCy1TIXXyfTqKzX2enDjK https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfciLKR3SgqOxCy1TIXXyfTqK... MIT's distributed systems course also touches on databases: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html Course by one of his disciples: https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2020/ https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2020/ Yet another disciple (in edx too): https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYp4IGUhNFmw8USiYMJvCUjZe79fvyYge https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYp4IGUhNFmw8USiYMJvCUj... The red book: http://www.redbook.io/ http://www.redbook.io/ For learning SQL really well, including relational algebra, I like this course: http://users.cms.caltech.edu/~donnie/cs121/ http://users.cms.caltech.edu/~donnie/cs121/