The story
It is named for the person who walked the road, and it starts where he started.
Tsi is a database administrator becoming a site reliability engineer. The Academy is the road he walked, written down while he was walking it. That is why it starts further back than any course you have seen: not at SELECT, but at what a mouse is and how a file differs from a folder.
Because that is where the real gap sits. Not talent, and not willingness. A beginner opens a database course, the first page assumes a laptop, a terminal and a vocabulary, and they close it again. The course was never written for them. So here every idea arrives as something already familiar, and only then is given its real name.
How a lesson works
Five beats, every time, so you always know where you are.
Read it, watch it happen, do it yourself, answer the check, then prove it on a real server. The check at the end is not marked and not recorded; it is there so a misunderstanding surfaces now rather than three phases later.
You cannot skip ahead
Each of the 22 phases opens only when its lessons are finished and its quiz is passed at 80 percent. Search finds only what has already been unlocked, so the app never hands over an answer that has not been earned. Quizzes can be retaken as often as needed, and the options are shuffled every time.
In your own language, read aloud
The whole app runs in English, French or Pidgin, and any lesson can be read aloud in a near-human voice. Tsi, an AI tutor who knows the entire course, answers questions at any point.
The practice
A real PostgreSQL, running on your own device.
This is the part that separates the Academy from a video. A genuine PostgreSQL 18 and a genuine Python run inside the browser through WebAssembly. Not a simulation, not a recording, and not a server somewhere else: the learner's own copy, on the learner's own phone.
So when a lesson says that updating two thousand rows leaves dead copies behind and bloats the table four times over, nobody has to take it on trust. They run the update, press the button, and watch the table swell in front of them. Then they run VACUUM and find the file exactly the same size, because VACUUM does not hand space back to the operating system, it marks it reusable. The next round of updates costs nothing, and that is the lesson.
A place where nothing can break
Alongside the database there is a safe terminal for real Linux and Windows commands, a monitoring lab, a DB Studio that shows pgAdmin, SSMS and Oracle Enterprise Manager as one shape, interview preparation, and a war room where a live outage is yours to diagnose and fix under time pressure.
Offline
It works with the signal off, and that is not a slogan.
The lessons, quizzes, checks and typefaces ship inside the app itself. The two engines, about 16 MB for PostgreSQL and 13 MB for Python, download once and then stay on the device for good. There is a button in My Progress that fetches them deliberately, so a teacher can prepare a room of devices on the school wifi before the lesson rather than discovering the problem during it.
This has been verified the hard way, with the browser cache cleared and the network disconnected: the lessons render, the quizzes work, search works, and both engines still answer.
What is in it
233 lessons, in order, nothing skipped in between.
- Computers from nothing: what the parts are, Windows, then Linux, then the command line.
- SQL end to end: SELECT, WHERE, JOINs, GROUP BY, subqueries, CTEs, window functions.
- PostgreSQL properly: data types, indexes, transactions, VACUUM, JSON, partitioning, extensions.
- How Postgres really works: MVCC, xmin and xmax, dead rows, the visibility map, HOT updates, TOAST, WAL, transaction ID wraparound.
- The other engines: Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL, and honestly how they compare.
- Keeping it up: replication, failover, repmgr, pgBouncer, pgBadger, pg_partman, pg_repack, backups and restores that are actually tested.
- Watching it: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, and writing your own checks when there is no budget for any of them.
- The modern job: cloud databases, containers, CI/CD, and site reliability engineering.
- The work itself: tickets, runbooks, standups, handovers, and how to write the incident note afterwards.
For teachers
One code on the board, and a room of pupils is enrolled.
Create a class and you get a class code and a PIN. Write the class code on the board. Each pupil taps "Join my class", types the code and their first name, and they are in. No pupil ever needs an email address, which matters when your pupils are children, and it means enrolment takes a minute rather than an evening of typing.
A roster that sorts by who needs you
The PIN opens a read-only roster: who has started, who is stuck, who is flying, with the ones who need help at the top. A teacher can see a pupil's work and cannot change it. If a pupil gets a new phone, one tap frees their code for it.
Lecture mode
Teaching from the front sizes the type for the back row, unlocks the whole course so anything can be demonstrated out of order, and records nothing against anybody while you do it.
Already a DBA?
A fast track across, and the places your instincts will be wrong.
Pick Oracle, SQL Server or MySQL and the Academy maps what you know onto PostgreSQL, then spends its time on the differences that catch experienced people out. Pass a short placement test and the Postgres phases open immediately, without walking back through what a mouse is.
Honest about itself
Free to learn. No adverts. Nothing sold to anybody.
Every lesson is free and will stay free. There are no adverts, no analytics and no third-party trackers. A pupil in a class never needs an email address, and progress can be deleted on request. What is paid for, when it is paid for, is the certificate that proves the skill and the tooling a school needs to run a class, never access to the learning itself.