1 Before you begin
Nearly every act of our lives generates data. Every purchase we make, every mile we travel, and every internet link we click adds to a colossal and ever-growing amount of data. It’s mind-boggling to think how much information is being generated, and how, for many organizations, this data has become the most valued of all assets.
All this data must be stored somewhere, in a place often referred to as “the database.” This database can be a virtual folder with any number of files or a sophisticated product designed for performance or scalability. Some people even refer to an Excel spreadsheet as a database, although we’ll discuss the validity of that claim in the next chapter.
For many organizations, data needs more than a place to be stored. It needs to be secure, able to grow, and searchable by a multitude of users and applications. To meet all these requirements, much of this prized data is contained in a certain type of database: a relational database. Relational databases have been around since the 1970s and have been in use in commercially available products for almost as long, and because they are well suited for most business scenarios, they remain extremely popular among organizations throughout the world.