You couldn’t sort, search, or filter it easily. You may have an inkling this made accessing and using the data a hassle. Instead of tables, the files contained long texts, in which the entries were separated with a vertical bar:Įmployee, Team, Experience|Anna, Developers, 7 years|Melissa, Developers, 3 years|Andrew, Developers, 4 years|Stanley, Designers, 4 years|Andy, Designers, 5 years|Christina, Designers, 2 years To fully grasp what is a relational database, you have to understand that before they came around, developers used flat databases. Codd received the prestigious Turing Award in 1981. However, because of this groundbreaking work to redefine database models, Edgar F. IBM was reluctant to put his ideas into practice. Trying to solve these issues, he wrote a paper called A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. According to him, not only they were over-complicated to use, but there was no solid theory to back the principles up. Working at IBM, he saw major disadvantages in the navigational databases that were used at the time. The first to mention the term relational database was Edgar F. While we must admit their popularity is growing, the relational databases still take up the lion’s share of the market. A few simple non-relational database examples would be key-value stores, document stores, or graph databases. As SQL (Structured Query Language) is the standard method of working with the former, the latter is sometimes also referred to as NoSQL. However, relational databases are so popular that some developers even simplify database typing down to two groups only: relational or non-relational. It can be operational, personal, distributed, end-user, etc. To manage them, we use a special kind of software – a database management system (DBMS for short).Īccording to the specific needs you or your company has, you can choose from multiple database types. Databases have been prominent in computer technology ever since the 1960s. Now, a database is a data storage solution that provides you with not only space to keep your data in, but also powerful methods to manipulate it. You couldn’t possibly access and use it for your needs.

Without using a database, all the data you create or collect would resemble a random pile without any order.

Free relational database