What is a database?

Quick reference

• 00:05 All right, welcome to the course.
• 00:06 My name is John Elder and I'll be your instructor today.
• 00:09 In this course, I'm going to teach you all about SQL and databases,
• 00:12 specifically with Microsoft SQL Server 2016.
• 00:15 And in this video,
• 00:17 I wanna take just a couple of minutes to kinda touch on what is a database?
• 00:21 What are they used for and why do we care?
• 00:23 So I've got Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio open and
• 00:26 we'll get into all this much later, we'll download this and install it ourselves.
• 00:30 But right now, we can sort of use it to look at,
• 00:33 I've got just a basic database table.
• 00:35 And it's just made up, as you can see, of columns and
• 00:39 rows that go left to right, and it's just full of information.
• 00:44 And these days, I mean, if you think about it,
• 00:47 there's not much of our modern life that isn't run by databases.
• 00:51 Every website you go to pretty much is run by a database.
• 00:54 If you go to Facebook, for instance, that's all a big database.
• 00:57 You're getting information from the database.
• 00:59 Every time you post on Facebook, you're adding information to a database.
• 01:03 Twitter, just a big database, so every tweet is an item in a database somewhere.
• 01:08 Instagram, all those pictures you upload,
• 01:10 they all get stuck in a database somewhere.
• 01:12 Every website, Pandora,
• 01:13 Spotify, that music is being fed to you from a database somewhere.
• 01:17 Everywhere there's data online, they're using a database.
• 01:20 Now there are tons of different databases out there.
• 01:23 There's lots of different databases to use.
• 01:25 And in this course, like I said, we're gonna be working with Microsoft SQL Server
• 01:30 2016, which is just Microsoft's version.
• 01:33 It's right up there at the top of the list of the most popular databases used in
• 01:37 the world.
• 01:37 But there's lots of different databases.
• 01:40 Right here, we see a list right here.
• 01:41 MySQL, Postgres, Mongo, Maria, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle,
• 01:46 Sybase, all of these different, and this is a very small list.
• 01:48 I mean, there's hundreds of different types of databases.
• 01:51 MySQL is a popular one that websites use, MySQL is free.
• 01:56 Postgre is a very popular one.
• 01:58 I teach a lot of Ruby on Rails and I use a lot of Ruby on Rails and
• 02:01 we use Postgre a lot with Ruby on Rails, cuz it just sorta goes with it.
• 02:05 So depending on what you're doing, depending on what you're building,
• 02:08 that's sorta gonna determine the type of database that you're gonna use.
• 02:12 Some databases are more powerful than others.
• 02:15 Some are very lightweight.
• 02:16 There's one called SQLite that I've used quite a bit in the past.
• 02:20 It's just a very, very simple database.
• 02:22 So as you gain more experience, as you build different things,
• 02:25 you'll sort of learn which types of databases to use.
• 02:29 In this course, we're gonna be focusing on Microsoft SQL Server.
• 02:32 And really, once you learn one of them,
• 02:34 I don't wanna say you know all the rest of them.
• 02:36 But you know enough to where you can sort of stumble around with a different
• 02:40 version.
• 02:40 So once you learn Microsoft SQL Server, using MySQL, for instance,
• 02:44 is gonna be a piece of cake.
• 02:45 The concepts are all the same from database to database.
• 02:49 And we'll learn that as we go along here.
• 02:50 They all have columns, they all have rows, they all use SQL structured query
• 02:54 language, we'll talk about in the next video, to interact within them.
• 02:57 So that's just a very quick intro to databases.
• 03:01 I'm sure you sort of understand what a database is already,
• 03:03 or else you wouldn't be here.
• 03:05 So in the next video, we'll look at a quick overview of SQL.
• 03:08 And then we'll jump in and start learning this stuff.

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