Introduction to databases — 1

Why database knowledge is necessary.

1. If you are some kind of back-end developer, then you must be interacting with the data.
2. With the advancement of frameworks like react.js and angular.js, even the frontend developer also needs to interact with the data. So whether you’re a front-end or back-end developer, you must understand at least the basics of databases.
3. Even if you are an aspiring data scientist, you should know at least the basics of SQL. Data scientists have to use many SQL commands in their daily use.

What is a database?

According to the definition of database, it is a structured set of data stored on a computer that can be accessed in various ways.

Let’s try to understand the definition of databases through a real world example.

A simple example: suppose that a company maintains a table for all its employees. This table consists of 4 columns. These column names will be Employee Number, Employee Name, Department Number, Phone Number. This will be considered as a database for employees. Let’s call this employee table as etable.

Some important definitions to understand databases.

DBMS: — Database Management System is a set of programs that helps in access, change, manipulate, update the data present in the database.

In simple terms, DBMS is a software through which we manage our database.

Let’s suppose that in our etable we want to add a new column, then we use the dbms software and add a new column.

MYSQL, ORACLE, PostgreSQL are some examples of DBMS.

Schema: — The database schema refers to the schema of the database you are creating.

It shows how the data will be organized in the database.

Normalization: — Normalization is done primarily to eliminate redundancy. 
If we have multiple copies of the same, we will call it redundant.

To get rid of these problems we have concepts of normalization.

Includes 1NF, 2NF, 3NF, BCNF, etc.

We will discuss the databases in detail on our future articles.

Introduction to databases — 2

Introduction to databases — 3