What are relational databases?
Databases have been a staple of business computing from the very beginning of the digital era. In fact, the relational database was born in 1970 when E.F. Codd, a researcher at IBM, wrote a paper outlining the process. Since then, relational databases have grown in popularity to become the standard. Originally, databases were flat. This means that the information was stored in one long text file, called a tab delimited file. Each entry in the tab delimited file is separated by a special character, such as a vertical bar (|). Each entry contains multiple pieces of information (fields) about a particular object or person grouped together as a record. The text file makes it difficult to search for specific information or to create reports that include only certain fields from each record. Here’s an example of the file created by a flat database: You can see that you have to search sequentially through the entire file to gather related information, such as age or salary. A relational datab
What is a database? A structured collection of records is known as a database. The way in which a database is structured is defined by the database model. Hierarchical model, network model, object model and relational model are some of the most commonly used models in the structure of databases. A database facilitates an organized storage of data in the form of records. The records can be queried in different ways to retrieve information from the database. Owing to an organized storage of data, a database becomes a useful tool of data storage. Databases form the basic tier of any multi-tier system. The information handled and manipulated by the other layers of an n-tier system is basically stored in a structured manner in a database. Take an example of any organization. How do you think they store their employee and customer information? Yes, they store it in a database. Imagine a website and where do you think the site maintains the login information about its users? The answer is aga
