Movie database tutorial

This is a tutorial that teaches you SurrealDB and its query language SurrealQL through a project to create a database with the world’s most popular movies.

The content comes from a restructuring of the final four chapters of Aeon’s Surreal Renaissance, a book that teaches you SurrealDB through an immersive story over 21 chapters. Since many people prefer to begin learning by building (and because we didn’t want to spoil the story in the book), we decided to offer that mini-project as its own course on Surreal University.

You can follow most of this tutorial via the Surrealist sandbox which doesn’t require anything except an open tab in your browser.

However, in the latter part of the tutorial we will see how a running SurrealDB instance works when signing in on the command line. At that point, you will want to have SurrealDB installed to give the behaviour a try yourself.

You can see all the queries of the tutorial that only require a Sandbox connection on this page. They are kept in order so that you can open up that page as well as you go through the tutorial if you prefer to see the final queries first.

Let’s get started!