Relational Databases

Week 5 Discussion – Relational Databases

Prior to this week’s assigned reading, my knowledge of Relational Databases was quite limited. For this reason, I chose a somewhat general article on Extensible Markup Languages to give me a broad understanding on what these databases are. The article mentioned the importance of databases in their ability to organize large quantities of information. This allows users trying to access the information a more streamlined experience. The information can be organized by specific catalog elements such as color, size or cost. The article addresses that while yesterday’s problems might have included finding data, today’s problems will be finding the right and accurate data. With an exponential amount of data being uploaded to the internet on a daily basis, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the correct information. Applying this to a corporation, where finding information in a speedily way can save money, the importance of a relational database is incredibly important.

The next article What Are Relational Databases provides more information about databases. In older or non-relational databases, data was stored in a text line. This format made searching through the information significantly more difficult. Relational databases, however, store data in tables with the columns being the specific field or search and the rows are the specific recorded data instances. Within these tables there may contain sub-tables, with additional information or user defined data. Amazon.com was mentioned as an example, where hundreds or even thousands of these relational databases would be used in conjunction to provide the most accurate search result. To the user, it does not even appear that the website is processing large quantities of data in such a short amount of time. It is evident how important these relational databases are in this case.

The third source is an article entitled What Are Flat File and Relational Databases? This article helped to further define what these relational databases are. It mentioned two companies, company A and company B, where A used a flat file database, but B used a relational database. For company A, customers would be viewed as one time customers and their information would only correlate to that specific purchase. However, customers going to company B would have a different experience. Instead, they would be entered into a “relational database” which stores their information to be used at a further date in time should they return. This would be beneficial for companies with returning customers/users and does not appear to be terribly difficult to set up. After reading this article I understood the importance of these relational databases and how they organize their information.