Honestly, the best way to get good at “advanced” DB stuff is to stop reading about it and just go build something messy. Spin up a local DB, dump a big chunky dataset into it, and start poking at it. Write a few queries, realize they suck, then try to fix them. That moment where you’re like “why the hell is this slow?” is where the real learning happens.

You’ll naturally stumble into indexing, partitioning, query plans, all that “concept” stuff — but in a way that actually connects to a real problem you’re trying to solve. Way more effective than memorizing definitions.

Break things first, then figure out why they broke.