Most developers treat databases as black boxes. This course opens them up. B-trees, write-ahead logging, MVCC, query planning, and storage engines — explained with diagrams, code, and references to the PostgreSQL and SQLite source.
This is a text-first course that links out to the best supporting material on the internet instead of trying to replace it. The goal is to make this the best course on database internals and systems engineering you can find — even without producing a single minute of custom video.
This course is built by people who ship production database systems for a living. It reflects how things actually work on real projects — not how the documentation describes them.
Every day has working code snippets you can paste into your editor and run right now. The emphasis is on understanding what each line does, not memorizing syntax.
Instead of shooting videos that go stale in six months, Precision AI Academy links to the definitive open-source implementations, official documentation, and the best conference talks on the topic.
Each day is designed to finish in about an hour of focused reading plus hands-on work. You can do the whole course over a week of lunch breaks. No calendar commitment, no live classes, no quizzes.
Each day stands alone. Read them in order for the full picture, or jump straight to the day that answers the question you have today.
Why databases use B-trees instead of hash maps. How pages, nodes, and splits work on disk. What EXPLAIN ANALYZE is actually showing you about index access patterns.
How databases survive crashes without losing data. The WAL as a sequential write buffer, checkpointing, and why Postgres writes things twice on purpose.
How multiple transactions read and write without locking each other. Snapshots, visibility rules, transaction IDs, and the dead tuple problem that requires VACUUM.
How the planner turns SQL into a physical execution plan. Sequential scans, index scans, hash joins, merge joins, and the statistics that drive the choice.
PostgreSQL heap files, SQLite B-tree everything, and RocksDB LSM trees. How each design makes different tradeoffs between read performance, write amplification, and space.
Instead of shooting our own videos, Precision AI Academy links to the best deep-dives already on YouTube. Watch them alongside the course. All external, all free, all from builders who ship this stuff.
Andy Pavlo's Carnegie Mellon database systems course lectures. The gold standard for understanding storage, concurrency, and query execution.
Visual walkthroughs of B-tree insertion, deletion, and the page splits that make on-disk indexes efficient.
How PostgreSQL's planner chooses between sequential scans, index scans, and join types based on table statistics.
Snapshots, visibility rules, and how MVCC enables concurrent reads and writes without explicit locking.
The best way to understand any technology is to read the production-grade implementations that prove it works. These repositories implement patterns from every day of this course.
The most-studied open-source database. The storage manager and executor source are the canonical reference for everything in this course.
The most deployed database on earth. The B-tree implementation in btree.c is a masterclass in on-disk data structures.
Meta's production LSM-tree key-value store. The source for the compaction strategy and memtable flush is the reference for Day 5.
The teaching database used in CMU 15-445. Intentionally incomplete so you can implement buffer pools, B-trees, and hash indexes yourself.
You write SQL but slow queries feel like magic. This course teaches you to read execution plans and understand exactly why a query is slow.
Your warehouse queries are slow and VACUUM keeps running. Understanding internals tells you which knobs to turn.
You need to pick between Postgres, SQLite, MongoDB, and RocksDB. This course explains the storage engine tradeoffs, not the marketing.
The 2-day in-person Precision AI Academy bootcamp covers database internals and systems engineering hands-on. 5 U.S. cities. $1,490. 40 seats max. June–October 2026 (Thu–Fri).
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