Introduction To Databases
A database is a form of electronic storage that holds data. For example, in the banking world, your bank uses a database to store data for customers, bank accounts and transactions. Another example is how the hospital stores records. An hospital has a database that stores patients data, staff data, laboratory data and more and in an online store, there is a database that retains your profile information along with your shopping history and accounting transactions. Overall, storing data is essentially important. It is also important to note that whatever the source of the data, the database will typically carry out the following actions all of which developers such as yourself must be familiar with. These include:
- Storing the data.
- Forming connections or relationships between areas or segments of the data.
- Filtering the data to show records.
- Searching data to return matching records.
- Adding functions to allow the data to be updated, changed and deleted.
At this junction, we have a brief insight into what database is and what it is capable of. Over the next few minutes, we shall dive a little further in what databases really are, its types, where they are stored and so much more. So,
What Is Data?
In basic terms, data is facts and figures about well, anything. For example, data could be your name, age, email address, phone number or if you are purchasing something online, it could be your order number or the description or order quantity and data. Whatever the case, data is crucial for individuals as well as organisations. So where is data stored? Data is no longer stored manually but is now stored in what we call a DATABASE.
What Is A Database?
A database is a form of electronic storage in which data is organised systematically. It stores and manipulates data electronically to make it more manageable, efficient and secure.
Types Of Databases
- Relational Database: This is a database where data is stored in the form of tables and relations.
- Object- Oriented Database: This is a database where data is stored in the form of objects. An example of this database could be an online bookstore.
- Graph Database: This is a database where data is stored in the form of nodes. In this case, entities like customer order and product are represented as nodes and the relationship between them are represented as edges.
- Document Database: This is a database where data is stored as JSON or JavaScript Object Notation Objects. The data is organised in collection like tables. Within each collection, a document written in JSON will record data.
Where Are The Databases Themself Stored?
A database can be hosted on a dedicated machine within the premises of an organisation or hosted on a cloud which is referred to as cloud hosting.
Cloud Hosting
As of now, cloud databases are currently popular choice when it comes to storing databases. This is because they allow you to store, manage and retrieve data through a cloud platform, access data through the internet and also provide a lower cost option for data management and other similar options.
How Is Data Related?
Data stored in a database cannot be isolated. It must relate to other data so it can be processed into meaningful information. So how do you make sure all the data in your database is related? By having a primary key field and a foreign key. A primary key uniquely identifies each record in a table. It ensures that each record can be uniquely retrieved, updated or deleted. A foreign key is a field in one table that connects to the primary key field in the original table. With this logic, data can be related by connecting this two.
Alternative Types Of Data
Databases have been around for a long time and have been influenced by many different trends. Over the years, trends, continuous rapid increase in data and so much more has brought about changes and limitations to how certain database works. We shall now examine this in more deatails.
Relational Databases
Relational database mostly stores structured data. Databases are now required to store more and more unstructured data. This is a limitation for relational databases. It is limited when it comes to storing data because they mostly store structured data and databases are now required to store more and more unstructured data.
NoSQL Databases
Since relational database is limited when it comes to storing unstructured data. The trend in recent years is to rely on NoSQL databases. They store data in a variety of different formats and provide databases with a flexible structure. This makes scaling easy by facilitating a change to the database structure itself. It is used by social media platforms, the Internet Of Things(IOT), artificial intelligence and other applications that generate massive amounts of unstructured data. Types of NoSQL databases include Document database, Key-value database and graph databases.
What Is Big Data?
Big data is complex data that can increase in volume with time. In other words, it’s data that can grow exponentially with time. Where does this kind of complex data come from? Social media platforms, online shopping sites and other services generate mass amount of data. All this data is highly unstructured or semi-structured. Big data is a combination of structured, unstructured and semi-structured data collected from many different services and one of its advantages is that it adds more power to data because it can address complex business problems that relational data cant handle.
Cloud Database
Organisations are now moving to cloud to free themselves from dealing with the infrastructure of physical server, maintenance and storage cost. Some or examples of cloud services include dropbox and icloud. With this, its possible to store data on the cloud. A much more affordable solution.
Conclusion
In conclusion, data and databases are important to any individual or organisation. In this article, we covered what these terms mean and what they can mean for you but there is more. In the next article, we will learn further. Stay Tuned!
