Understanding on General Database concepts

What is Database

  • A database is an application that organized a collection of data to store in particular way.
  • Database can be of many types such as File database, Relational Database, Distributed Database etc.

What is Relational Database?

Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is software that:

  • Uses the concept of grouped two dimensional tables which consist of rows and columns.
  • Draw relationships between multiple tables and present the output as a table again.
  • Provides facility primary key, to uniquely identify the rows.
  • Sharing a common column in two or more tables (primary key and foreign key).
  • Provides auto increment of indexes.
  • Provides multi user accessibility that can be controlled by individual users.

RDBMS Terminology

  • Relation - Table
  • Tuple - Row, record
  • Cardinality - Number of rows
  • Attribute - column, field
  • Degree - Number of columns
  • Primary key - unique identifier
  • Domain - set of legal values

What is SQL?

  • SQL stands for "Structured Query Language" which is the standard language used to interact with databases.
  • It's simple to learn and appears to do very little but is the heart of a successful database application.

MySQL Database

  • MySQL is a free, open-source database engine available for different platforms.
  • MySQL represents an introduction to modern database technology for high-volume application.
  • Modern database is efficient way to store, retrieve large amount of data.
  • MySQL uses a standard form of the well-known SQL data language.

Features of MySQL

Multiple User Support Multiple clients have concurrent access to one (or more) databases simultaneously.
Powerful and flexible user privilige system.
User and host-based authentication schemes.
Web Application Support MySQL database driven applications for the Desktop and Web APIs for: C/C++, Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python...
Internationalization Support for various languages and character sets
Speed Multi-threaded architecture: Multiple clients have concurrent access
Query Cache: Cache the results of common queries
Reliability Ease of use
Command line interface
Graphical tools- Desktop/ Web based
Scalability Databases containing millions of records
Portability Unix/ Non-Unix: Linux, Solaris, Windows...
Stored Programs Stored Procedures and functions
Triggers
Views
Event Scheduler