| The best way to think of a database is in terms of a filing cabinet. In the previous paragraphs, I mentioned that a database can be thought of like a filing cabinet. The filing cabinet contains drawers, the drawers contain folders, and the folders contain documents that have information on them. A database is similar in concept. A database contains drawers, otherwise known as tables; those tables contain folders, or columns, which in turn contain rows of information pertaining to the particular column that they are in. For a moment, let's take the preceding Web store example and break it down to see exactly what kind of information we would need and just how we could break it up to make it manageable. Customers We would need some way of keeping track of all our registered customers, along with shipping addresses, billing addresses, credit card information, and so forth. Inventory If we are to keep track of how many of a certain item we have sold as well as quantities in stock, we would need some way of keeping track of our inventory. Product Information Some way of differentiating between all our products is necessary, including sizes, colors, prices, and other characteristics that relate to a specific item. Transactions We would need to include a history of all transactions and a way of knowing which customers are ordering what so that we can recommend products to people dynamically in the future. Traditionally, we could take all these elements and create a Word document or perhaps a spreadsheet within Excel and physically write on these documents whenever someone ordered something. We could take these documents and store them into folders alphabetically and even store all the folders within one central filing cabinet. Although this is a traditional example of how business can work, it very closely resembles how the modern database operates in relation to our traditional model. The filing cabinet, the drawers, folders, and even the documents within them all represent the basic parts of a modern database structure: |
