Fill the empty server with real data. Create databases and tables with the right data types and keys, then practice the four everyday operations — add, read, change, remove — plus safe cleanup. These verbs underpin the rest of the course.

Move past the single all-powerful root login to per-user, least-privilege access. Create users keyed to a host, grant and revoke precise privileges, audit what a user can do, and use roles to manage access at scale.

Design tables whose column rules keep data trustworthy. Pick the right data type for each value, evolve a live table with ALTER TABLE, and add the constraints and defaults that reject bad data on every insert.

Keep very large tables fast by splitting them into partitions so a query reads only the slice it needs. Learn what partitioning is and why partition pruning helps, then build all four partition types and when to use each.

Look under the hood at storage engines the component that decides how data is written, locked, and protected and extend the server with plugins. The SQL stays the same; the engine underneath changes the rules.

Defend against the two fears every DBA carries losing data, and unexplained slowness. Take logical backups with mysqldump and restore after a simulated disaster, then enable and read the slow query log to find exactly which query is dragging.

Run MariaDB in containers and connect a real application to it. Learn why containers solve "works on my machine," containerize a Flask app alongside MariaDB, watch a lone container fail because it can't find the database, then wire both together with Docker Compose.