Database Terminology - A Beginners Guide

Key Takeaways

to complete our theoretical preparation we will need to learn more database terminology this is a necessary step that will help us when we start coding in SQL later let's go through the entire process of creating a database assume our database containing customer cells data has not been set up yet okay so imagine you are the shop owner and you realize you have been selling goods quite well recently and you have more than a million rows of data what do you need then a database but you know nothing about databases who do you call an SQL specialist no you need a database designer she will be in charge of deciding how to organize the data into tables and how to set up the relations between these tables this step is crucial if the database design is not perfect from the beginning your system will be difficult to work with and wouldn't facilitate your business needs you will have to start over again considering the time and data and money involved in the process you want to avoid going back to point zero what do database designers actually do they plot the entire database system on a canvas using a visualization tool there are two main ways to do that one is drawing an entity relationship diagram an ER diagram for brief it looks like this and as its name suggests the different figures represent different data entities and the specific relationships we have between entities the connections between tables are indicated with lines this way of representing databases is powerful and professional but it is complicated we will not focus in depth on ER diagrams in this course but you should know they exist and refer to the process of database design another form of representation of a database is the relational schema this is an existing idea of how the database must be organized it is useful when you are certain of the structure and organization of the database you would like to create more precisely a relational schema would look like this it represents a table in the shape of a rectangle the name of the tables at the top of the rectangle the column names are listed below all relational schemas in a database form the database schema you can also see lines indicating how tables are related in the database as you probably noticed we have some other features but we will leave their explanation for the next lecture once the database design process is done the next step would be to create the database to this moment it has been ideas planning abstract thinking and design at this stage it would be correct to say SQL can be used to set up the database physically as opposed to contriving it abstractly then you can enjoy the advantages of data manipulation it will allow you to use your data set to extract business insights that aim to improve the performance and efficiency of the business you are working for this process is interesting and practically the main part of the course will be related to that remember well-thought-out databases that are carefully designed and created are crucial prerequisites for data manipulation if you have done good work with these steps we could write effective queries and navigate in a database rather quickly you will often hear the term database management it comprises all these steps of business undertakes to design create and manipulate its databases successfully finally database administration is the most frequently encountered job amongst all a database administrator is the person providing daily care and maintenance of a database her scope of responsibilities is narrower regarding the ones carried out by a database manager but she is still indispensable for the database department of a company this lecture allowed us to learn certain terms you will be using often when dealing with a databases I can't wait to get to the next video where we will explain how meaningful a relational schema can be for you to understand the functioning of a certain database see you there