We are going to start with the very first topic of our tutorial, that is, Data, Tables and Databases in this article. You can find the YouTube video for this section below:-
What is Data?
Data are units of information that are gathered and used for some specific purpose.
In simple words, any piece of information that we store or use is called data. Your name is a data, your date of birth is a data, your age is a data, everything is a data until it has some meaningful use.
There is a lot of data present around us. But in order to make use of this data, it must be in a usable form. It must be in a particular structure (organised way) so that we can take out the data of our concern with ease and in less time.
This can be done in many ways, and one of the most useful, popular and efficient structure of organizing data is tabular structure.
We make use of tables for this purpose.
What are Tables?
A table is an organized arrangement of related data in the tabular form containing rows and columns, making it easier to understand and compare data.
We speciify a set of rules/features/attributes/category in which we distribute the data we have. This helps us find any data easily (if required in future) if we know what category it belongs to.
The category is called Columns.
| Columns are Vertical |
The data (of a particular object) are filled in these columns as something called Rows.
| Rows are Horizontal |
Suppose we have a table containing information about students, then each row contains all details of a particular student like student's ID, student's name, student's age and student's course.
For instance, the 2nd row has all the details of a single student, like, ID is 2, Name is Thomas Edward, Age is 18, and Course is Physics.
| Sample Table |
Whereas, each column, i.e, ID, Name, Age and Course respectively contain a specific information about all students, like ID contains all IDs of all students, Name contains name of all students and so on.
So this is how information is stored in a table.
Rows are also called records.
Columns are also called fields.
What are Databases?
A database is an organized collection of structured data or information, which is specifically stored on a computer system and controlled by a DataBase Management System (DBMS).
So, simply a database is a collection of multiple tables. It acts as a conatiner for multiple tables. If you want some tables to be kept separately from others, you can simply create a database and store them in it together, and other tables in another database.
Relational Database:
Any databse which contains tables which are related/connected to each other in any means, then that database is called a relational database.