[jacques_chester]

I realised a few years ago that pretty much every database course taught only teaches OLTP. OLAP never really gets a lookin.

At my university, standard normalisation was taught in the "databases" course. OLAP was mentioned as part of the "advanced databases" course.

The database course at that time blew about half its time on building PHP applications to talk to the database. I hate to second guess my professors, but I can't help but feel that a more productive use of the time would have been to teach normalised OLTP in the first half, and dimensionally modelled OLAP in the second half. Better yet, to divide them into two courses and spend some time talking about database history ("here's why network and hierarchical databases sucked") and maybe some introduction to how query planners work.

[eru]

Do you know of any resource that talks about the same topic as your comment, but in more detail?

[wisty]

Philip Greenspan's SQL tutorial is a nice starting point: http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/

It's a bit old, but still pretty good.

[jacques_chester]

I'm not sure I follow you.

[eru]

To be more stereotypical: I am intrigued and would like to sign up to your newsletter.

[jacques_chester]

Well ... really, just read a good pair of textbooks on each side of the spectrum. Date's Databases and Kimball's The Data Warehouse Toolkit are good.

Edit: actually, maybe not Date. It's up to you. It's good, but it's controversial because he's not a fan of SQL and so he uses his own language.

The one I used in uni was Ramakrishnan & Gehrke's Database Management. It was OK but there's a certain amount of at-the-time trendy bullshit that to me detracts from a focus on relational databases for their own sake.

Edit 2: and Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties contains good oil on the relational paradigm.