As if PHP wasn't enough, now you find out you have to be able to work with databases as well! Well, never fear, Timothy has a database primer that will get you headed in the right direction.
Databases are stores of information. They allow one to easily record and access large amounts of information for a variety of purposes. Because pretty much any type of information can be stored in a database, they can be found literally everywhere. Databases store medical records, police reports, sale transactions, music and video collections and more!
Databases have proven handy in web development, too. Database servers such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracl and DB2 provide efficient storage and data management tasks for dynamic, content driven sites.
Databases store their information in groups of records known as tables. For example, a particular table may resemble the following:
Last Name First Name Address City State Zip Code --------------------------------------------------------------------- Adams Gwendolyn 205 W Third St. Brownville AL 35020 Johnson Diane 82 Richardson Ave. Fresno CA 93702 Smith Harold 321 Elm St. Portsmouth RI 02871
The table contains the name and addresses of several individuals; each line forms a record consisting of an individual's last name, first name, address, city, state and postal code. The table keeps these similar records grouped together.
A database can contain more than one table. A database that can search and retrieve information from different tables and then relate it to that from other tables in the database is often called a Relational Database.
If you are familiar with spreadsheet applications, you may think a table akin to a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is a table with each row comprises one record and each column is a different field. And as a spreadsheet workbook is a collection of related spreadsheets, a database is a collection of related tables.
