You must have heard of the word database. This word may seem very strange and very technical at first. But if we say that you deal with the concept of this science every day, do you believe it? In this article and training file, we want to fully answer the question, what is a database? Here’s everything you need to know about a database with some very interesting and everyday examples. So join Orangency team to learn what a Database is.
Table of Contents
What is a Database?
If we want to define this concept, we can do it in two ways. We can talk about very specialized, very strange and very technical definitions that only experts can understand, and we can explain this concept very simply.
We choose the second way and we want to explain this concept in a very simple way and with attractive examples that will stay in your mind forever and you will understand what a database really is. We begin our explanation with the following two examples.
List of restaurants!
Suppose you are with friends or relatives and you want to order food from a fast food. What do you usually do? Either go to online food ordering apps, or bring fast food brochures and ask attendees to choose the food they want.
In fact, in this example, you have a list of fast foods that contain information such as the names of foods, their prices and in that list.
In this case, we can tell your collection of advertising brochures, a database of fast foods around you.
Or, for example, a phone book
In the second example, we want to talk about one of the nostalgias that was more prevalent in our homes in the past. Phone books containing the contact numbers of all the relatives and friends we wanted to call.
Whenever we wanted to call someone, we would go to that phone book, look for the name of the person we were looking for, find his or her number, and call him or her.
In this example, we can say that the phonebook was a database of phone numbers.
Now using these two examples, we want to answer this question: What is a database?
A very simple definition
If we want to have a very simple definition of a database, we can say:
A system that keeps our collection of information organized. For example, a database of telephone numbers, a database of restaurants around us, a database of our business customers, a database of students at a school, and so on. So the Database stores the information we need and makes it easy for us to access it.
You may be wondering how a database makes it easy for us to access information.
How does a database make it easy for us?
A database can contain one or more tables. Each table can also contain different columns and rows that keep the information in the table organized for us. In the following, we will pay more attention to these concepts and answer the question “What is a Database?” In more detail.
Why should we use a database?
You may be wondering, “Why should we use a database at all?” Very good question.
You may be able to maintain a collection of restaurants around you, students at a school, etc. without the use of databases and tables. But as the number of your items (restaurants or students) increases, accessing and searching for this data and information becomes very difficult and sometimes impossible.
So the Database, by using the neat structuring that it gives to our data and information, makes our information very organized and integrated in the long run, and access to it is very easy.
So in response to the question “Why should we use the database?” We can say that:
Database puts our information and data into tables. These tables make data storage very simple and orderly for us and give them great integration. For example, a phone book that is written in a certain order and has integrated rows and columns is called a database.
An example: PHP and MySQL
Following the answer to the question “What is a Database?”, We want to give a practical example. Different web design programming languages and environments have different databases.
For example, when you want to do a web design with PHP, you need to use the MySQL database for your website. If you want to know more about this, we suggest you to read out latest articles.