This article was originally conceived as a set of tutorial exercises for undergraduate biology majors for a natural products course at the Institute of Botany, Technische Universität Dresden (2020/21 academic year). The overall goals of these exercises are to identify different compound databases (open access and commercial) from which compounds could be searched for academic reasons. The reader will be Initiated to basic tools for querying compound databases (including searching for molecular properties, similarity searching and sub-structure searching), the concept of chemical scaffolds and the familiarity with the major chemical scaffolds encountered in the natural products lectures. In addition, the read should be able to identify two secondary metabolite databases and use the web to search them, use of the web browser for querying compound databases (including searching for molecular properties, similarity searching and sub-structure searching). Application of the concept of chemical scaffolds and the familiarity with the major chemical scaffolds encountered in natural products lectures is expected. The last set of tutorial exercises are intended to identify databases containing taxonomic information on plants and animal species, use a web browser to search the contents of two open access databases that help to establish the taxonomy of medicinal plants. This includes establishing a clear definition of chemotaxonomy by use of examples. e.g. employ the ANPDB to establish the relationship between a selected list of plant families and their chemical content.