What is a Database?
A database is a software application that stores organized information into a table structure in order to easily access, analyse, edit and add structured data.
So what are tables?
A table is a structure of rows and columns where every row is an individual record containing one or more columns of related and specific data.
A Customer Table, for example, could contain columns for first and last names, address, age, gender, favourite teddy bear. A database can contain many tables and in Relational Databases the tables can rely on information from other tables.
For example, the Customer table above could link to another table specifying a list of teddy bears the customer can choose from.
What’s a Relational Database?
A Relational Database is a database whose tables contain links (technically called ‘Foreign Keys’) that control the flow of data being entered, altered or deleted.
The tables that are linked are said to be ‘related’ in some way. Records stored in the tables of a relational database each contain a unique ID called a key. This key can then be represented across multiple tables and a logical data structure is formed.