Pros: The course content covers a lot of relevant topics on Database Management. Things like Basic SQL queries, Database Normalization, Conceptual and Logical databases, and making ER diagrams are covered in the course.

Cons: Prof Mannino is a bit robotic in his reading out of long sentences and the constant pace of talking. There is tons of repetition of sentences and words mere seconds after they were just spoken. The lectures seem to be a collection of bullet points.

The assignments and the peer review structure is really a low point. There's no specific grading rubric - so points allocation is random and based on your peer's assessment. I had many instances where my right answers were marked as wrong. There is nothing you can do to correct it. Moreover, the questions are iterative and thus the same apparent error carries on and you get multiple wrong scores.

Assignments need to be submitted in documents. Separate documents for each question !! At times, even a one-line answer needs to be in a separate document. Pictures of database diagrams need to be pasted in said documents. It was a bit frustrating to take screenshots all the time. Especially when you make a small correction, and have to take screenshots AGAIN, then paste it AGAIN, and upload AGAIN !!

Summary: Take the course for it's content, and use the assignments as good practice. Don't take the grading seriously. Also, focus on the content rather than the delivery by the professor, and you will still be able to get some value out of the course (and the specialization by extension)

The specialization is great, and the course breadth and topics described in each is equally good. For this course, however, I felt like I could have covered what was taught by myself with a book, i.e. I didn't feel like it was class room level engaging with the explanations.

I realized this is a one way MOOC, but I've taken courses off and on since they came out, and some others felt more interactive. This was more of here's a slide, I will read what's on the slide and explain some topics. The assignments were not bad, but definitely took more time than stated (just keep that in mind). The other thing that would help immensely is having TAs in the course. It's possible that they may get some later, but I've felt I learned/got feedback a lot more in courses with TAs.

That said, this is an excellent introduction to databases course, and there's not many of them out there. If I had to go it again, I would, and I also paid for getting the cert - if anything for career advancement and having it on your LinkedIn profile as a starter DB course.

Nice introductory course for database management. Assignments are challenging enough for beginners like me but I like that. If I'm already 'investing' my time into something I expect to learn something in return. This course gave me that kind of reciprocity. Course would benefit from radically different approach to video-lessons. Reading from power-point slides which are written in the same manner, have identical structure tends to become tedious after a while. Professor seems nice and knowledgeable but a bit more relaxed and/or engaging approach would be beneficial to many. Oh, and peer-reviewed grading, wherever possible, should be replaced with an auto-grader. That's not a critique, though. Not quite sure if it's even possible with this kind of material.

The material is fine but the course isn't taught well. The instructor tends to start talking immediately in subject jargon and abbreviations without first giving students an intro or explaining foundation material first. It seems a lot of material is left out of the lectures and slides on purpose and forces students to buy the instructor recommended text book (which is also authored by the instructor). After each lecture I'm forced to Google search a lot of what was mentioned before I even understood half of what the instructor was talking about. I didn't pay to listen to something that forces me to Google search everything.

Pros: Information is perfect for anyone looking at Business Intelligence as a career field, or already in the career field itself. I found the first week to challenge my on-the-job knowledge of a fuller set of concepts and general terminology.

Cons: The wording on the quiz questions, in some cases, seems much different than the PPT slides and the instructor's language. UPDATE: The wording is a significant challenge, even when advancing into the more complex topics. I have had many differences of opinions on the solutions based on wording in the requirements.

Start of this course was very good. But after week 5, assignments became very repetitive and most of the assignments were based on developing an ERD in a tool called ER Assistant. I feel like this part could be covered in 2 weeks time and more stress could have been given to the SQL part of the course.

Though content is good slides and delivery style could be better. More comparison with latest technologies can be provided. Need for more interactive quizzes so as to make it more relevant to fast-changing database world.

Good course with a lot of hands-on assignments. Sometimes the lectures could be brought in a more intuitive way and were a bit 'over-theorized', which made relatively simple concepts seem more complex than they were.

Great content, horrible technical support from Coursera and the team that runs this program (since it is clearly obvious that Michael Mannino just recorded the videos and is not part of the class anymore).

The course was clear, I had difficulties to find course materials, especially examples were used in the video class, I wish they had been put in more obvious places.

Interesting, I would have liked to deepen SQL knowledge and practice. The conceptual parti seems a little bit too important.

This course is really helpful About Database Systems.

I wish to have more contact with the academic crew.

Need more lessons on nested queries and subqueries

A free book to read would have been nice.

Baaic understanding about Database

Peer Review is sub-optimal

Very time consuming.

looking good, so far

Good Solid

I could not finish because videos were stuttered - even with bigger bandwidth - and as a consequence I could not finish the course and the exercises in my limited free time (therefore, only 2 stars). Is the problem solved now - cause I d like to resume the course again. If that's more successful now I would start the next parts of the specialization.

Thank you for an answer!

can't wait to rate this course! I hope I could give 1 start but to show respect I rated it 2. It's just because I personally don't like the instructor and the way he talks, which could ruin the course! I truly hope we could have another instructor in the following courses or the whole specialization would be ruined and so would my interest in database.

Poor english, hard to follow assignments (instructions spread out over 3-4 microsoft word documents with no links between them). Teaches SQL with MixedCase namings, all-named constraints and other non-standard syntax.

No help to upload Oracle Application for use with lesson - not good. Also have to buy the text book which is fine. Should provide option to buy thru Amazon Kindle - easy to use.

Expected a lot more from the course. Also, the teaching style isn't very engaging either.