One DB Does Not Fit It All: Teaching the Differences in Advanced Database Systems

In this article we report on our experience with teaching differences that exist between relational and non-relational data models. We present results of an evaluation of a practical course in which students are assigned 15 queries within 6 tasks that they execute on four different database systems. The pedagogical aim of this course was to show conceptual differences between data models, difficulties that can occur when trying to formulate queries in different query languages, as well as specific system behavior. We evaluate the practical course based on a questionnaire that recorded the students’ performance on each task for each DB system.