Why we make databases „relational“?

Knowledge is power and the databases are the foundation of that knowledge.

In the real world databases are very large, having milions of rows in a single table. These commonly use databases are called relational databases.

This term came about from structuring databases in a way that table are linked to each other by shared attributes.

These links are the relationships between tables. As an organizations data needs grow . They need databases that can grow and scale with them. How would database schema is designed has a tremendous impact on the types of the reports they can generate and the performance of that database.

There are many reasons why why relational databases become the standard for application data storage.

A few which are:

Maximizing storage
Eliminating redundant data reduces storage requirements on disk

Better application functionality
Well structured and properly segmented data it can be accessed and modified quickly

Cleaner, reacher data for business reporting
Bad data leads to bad reports. Relational databases allow schema designers to use good data principles which lead to better data quality and better reports.

If you imagine unstructured data in forms in a poly database schema it might look like this:


But if you organize your data with more thoughtful approach it might stops look like this:

This is what relational databases do. They organize data into related tables that give context and meaning between the words and numbers connected with them.

In the upcoming posts we will be taking a look at the concepts that make relational databases work .

And stop thinking about data in terms of sets of individual values or rows.

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