Relational Databases

Of course in the 80's the "Relational Database Model" became the rage. The Relational Model developed out of the work done by Dr. E. F. Codd at IBM in the late 1960s who was looking for ways to solve the problems with the existing models.

Because he was a mathematician, he naturally built the model on mathematical concepts which he expounded in the famous work called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Databanks".

At the core of the relational model is the concept of a table (also called a relation) in which all data is stored. Each table is made up of records (horizontal rows also known as tuples) and fields (vertical columns also known as attributes).

It is important to note that how or where the tables of data are stored makes no difference. Each table can be identified by a unique name and that name can be used by the database to find the table behind the scenes. As a user, all you need to know is the table name in order to use it. You do not need to worry about the complexities of how the data is stored on the hard drive.

This is quite a bit different from the hierarchical and network models in which the user had to have an understanding of how the data was structured within the database in order to retrieve, insert, update, or delete records from the database.

So how do you find data in a relational database if there is no map (like a hierarchy defined by pointers) to follow?

Well, in the relational model, operations that manipulate data do so on the basis of the data values themselves. Thus, if you wish to retrieve a row from a table for example, you do so by comparing the value stored within a particular column for that row to some search criteria.

For example, you might say (not getting into syntax yet) "Give me all the rows from the 'STUDENTS' table which have 'Selena' in the 'FIRST_NAME' column."

The database might return a list which looks essentially like this:

You could then use the data from a retrieved row to query another table. For example, you might say "Okay, I want to know what grade 'Selena Sol' received in 'Underwater Basket Weaving 101'. So I will now use the 'Student ID' number from my previous query as the keyword in my next query. I want the row in the 'Underwater Basket Weaving Course' table where student ID equals 'SID-001'.

This data access methodology makes the relational model a lot different from and better than the earlier database models because it is a much simpler model to understand. This is probably the main reason for the popularity of relational database systems today.

Another benefit of the relational system is that it provides extremely useful tools for database administration. Essentially, tables can not only store actual data but they can also be used as the means for generating meta-data (data about the table and field names which form the database structure, access rights to the database, integrity and data validation rules etc).

Thus everything within the relational model can be stored in tables. This means that many relational systems can use operations recursively in order to provide information about the database. In other words, a user can query information concerning table names, access rights, or some data and the results of these queries would then be presented to the user in the form of a table.

This makes database administration as easy as usage!

Network Databases
Introduction to Databases for the Web | Table of Contents
Client/Server Databases