The Practical Database Design Masterclass: Build a Blog Database from Scratch is an in-depth, project-based course that teaches you how to design, structure, and optimise relational databases from the ground up. Whether you’re a complete beginner or an aspiring developer, this masterclass gives you the technical and conceptual foundation needed to design real-world databases with precision and confidence.

You’ll begin by exploring the core principles of relational databases, learning essential terminology such as entities, attributes, relationships, and data types. Through clear explanations and guided exercises, you’ll gain an understanding of how data is organised, stored, and managed effectively in a database system. You’ll also discover the key objectives of good database design — accuracy, efficiency, integrity, and scalability.

Once you understand the fundamentals, you’ll embark on a full-scale blog database project, following a structured, eight-stage design process. You’ll start by identifying entities and attributes, defining their relationships, and mapping out your design using Lucidchart to create a detailed Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD). As the project progresses, you’ll refine your table structures through normalisation, resolving issues like multivalued and multipart fields to ensure data consistency and eliminate redundancy.

You’ll then move on to establishing table keys, including candidate and primary keys, and learn how to apply first (1NF), second (2NF), and third normal forms (3NF) to produce a fully normalised, optimised database schema. By mastering dependency analysis and key relationships such as one-to-many, many-to-many, and one-to-one, you’ll gain the skills needed to design professional-level databases for any type of application.

In the final stage, you’ll expand the project by incorporating advanced features for a blog system — such as user actions, post ratings, comment structures, and objectionable content flags — simulating the kind of scalability and flexibility needed in real-world applications. Each step builds on the last, reinforcing best practices and giving you practical experience in database development that you can apply immediately.

By the end of this masterclass, you’ll not only have built a fully functional blog database but also gained a deep understanding of relational design principles, entity modelling, and data normalisation. You’ll be ready to create databases for websites, applications, and business systems that are efficient, reliable, and easy to maintain.