Database Essentials (
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Are you new to the wonderful world of databases? Confused by the
sudden flood of technical jargon? Don't know the difference between a
"trigger" and a "stored procedure", a "join" and a "subquery"? Look no
further - the solution is right here!A wise man once said that information is power. And in the Internet age, that
statement has been proved correct more than once.
As more and more
companies move their businesses online, a vast sea of digital data comes into
being, bits and bytes that control both where businesses have come from, and
where they will go in the future. Everything a company knows about its business,
its customers and its partners is slowly being converted into ones and zeroes,
turning paper-based offices into cyberspace-based virtual workplaces, increasing
productivity and streamlining business processes.
Of course, there's a
flip side to this as well. As the volume of data grows, it becomes harder to
track and manage it effectively. And so some bright spark came up with the idea
of organizing all that data into databases - essentially, data storage
containers that impose a structure on the data they contain, so as to simplify
the task of managing and using all that information.
This is a
fundamentally good idea, since it first makes it possible to organize large
amounts of information, and then search through this information for specific
items of data. It also offers benefits from the point of view of portability and
compatibility (once the data is organized and stored in a database, it can be
extracted and displayed in any manner you choose), provides a centralized
storage location for important information, and makes it easier to identify
relationships between different data segments.
Over the next few pages,
I'm going to give you a crash course in some of the basic concepts of database
theory, in the hope that it will offer a starting point for your own exploration
of this field of study. If you're a novice when it comes to databases, some of
the concepts explained here should help you put things in perspective, provide
you with an explanation of some of the terms used by database engineers, and
also offer you some insight into the capabilities of today's most popular
database engines.
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