Database Development

A database is an organised model for storing data. Databases have been around for a number of years. If you’ve ever used Microsoft Access, then you’ll have a basic understanding of how databases are managed.

Pretty much everything we do nowadays is stored in a Database of some sort. Every bank, Facebook account or alike will be stored in this manner. It’s completely transparent to the user and it is fundamental to making systems or websites work.

With all websites we build be it an e-commerce website, online system or content management system, database design is part of the process of making them work. The database design process and/or build is something we offer outside of our core business.

Structured Query Language or SQL for short essentially a coding language that allows you to issue commands to a database. Using this language, you can create new tables, insert data, update data and retrieve infortma from a database. Each database type has a slightly different version of SQL syntax, but mostly they are the same. Some syntax can vary between database types as well as some functions.

There are numerous of different database types, some just for use in different industries, while others are competing in the same market place. The good news is that all of them can be modelled in the same way and follow the same basic principles. Therefore, modelling for one database means you can essentially model for them all.

MySQL

The most common website storage engine on Linux. MySQL is responsible for storing databases for PHP based websites. When you take into account PHP is now used by 82% of websites worldwide (including Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia), that’s a pretty large number. All of the database development at AWD is created in MySQL.

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL server is still one of the most popular databases around simply due to it’s longevity in the market. It is the primary storage for Microsoft ASP’s based websites.

Oracle

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL server is still one of the most popular databases around simply due to it’s longevity in the market. It is the primary storage for Microsoft ASP’s based websites.

Other Alternatives

There are many other databases on the market including DB2, SysBase, Postgres and many more. Each has it’s own benefits but overall they are all pretty good.

Databases have a problem and that is redundant data. It is essentially a potential waste of storage in many circumstances. That’s where normalisation comes in. It’s the process of removing fields that are causing redundancy and restructuring them into new tables to remove redundancy.

Normalisation is an important part of database design and development. In extremely large databases, it can save huge amounts of storage, something that is extremely important in such a scenario.