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Web Development Terminology - Database
Oct 31, 2008
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I am sure a lot of you are familiar with this what a database is, but in the web firm business we come across some who are still unaware of what a database is and what it is good for.
Essentially a database is a place to store data. Common choices for database engines are Mysql, MsSQL, Postgresql and Oracle. A database engine gives you some functionality built around a database and will take care of storing the data in a matter that makes it easily and quickly retreivable later.
To get an understanding of how a database works, you can think of a database as a bunch of excel spreadsheets. Each Table has columns and row, each column represents a field and usually has a name associated with it, each row has the actual data for the instance. Such that you may have something like:
| id | name | date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | bob | bob@bob.com | 10/28/08 |
| 2 | sam | sam@sam.com | 10/27/08 |
| 2 | sam | sam@sam.com | 10/27/08 |
| 3 | greg | greg@greg.com | 10/26/08 |
| 4 | john | john@john.com | 10/25/08 |
This makes for a good visualization of how a database looks. This table above would be good start for an email list. Most common database engines will provide data look ups using a scripting language called SQL.
SQL allows us to query the data in different ways, selecting only rows that match a conditional rule or even to sort the rows by date or id.
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