If you remember from the Marvel Avengers movies, one of the most critical and universe-defining events is “the blip” or “the snap.” This article will show you how to build a simple web app using Node.js that shows all the Marvel characters and their “blip” status, giving us the ability to update each character’s blip state on the database by clicking a button. We use Express.js as our framework and Pug for page templates and seed the database with character data from the official Marvel API while referencing our list of blipped and non-blipped characters to add a flag to the data. And, of course, CockroachDB Serverless is our database. Finally, we deploy our app to Heroku.

Structured Query Language (SQL) was developed to work with relational databases that organize and store information in groups of columns and rows, called tables. They are “relational” because of relations linking data between different tables (think: Excel). SQL has lasted for decades, and it’s become the industry standard because of its ease, versatility, and power in working with transactional data. SQL is easy to learn for beginners, and can take developers far in their careers. It’s still the best language for defining data architecture, and it remains more popular among data engineers and scientists than languages like Python or R.