What is SQL Database? Intro to SQL Database

So you are interested in SQL Databases? Well we’ll need to do some basic foundation building to get through what exactly that is. First off SQL is an ANSI (American National Standard Institute) standard, meaning it has a certain set of commands that ever version has to accept to meet the standard. There are different other commands that different versions can employ. One would use this Structured Query Language (SQL) to access and manipulate databases. Many databases use this as their “front end”, meaning that when it is time for you to interact with the database you’ll be using SQL commands.

While that sounds great, why would you want to use a database to begin with? There can be a number of reasons, for example they can be very useful when you need to share large amounts of data with a large number of people. Instead of saving all that data in a word document you could put it in a database. Then instead of having the document being sent to everyone when a single change is made the database is stored on the cloud. This allows your whole team the ability to log on, change data at the same time and rapidly pull up the data from the database that they need.

A database server is a collection of a number of databases. The databases themselves are merely collections of 2 dimensional tables. These tables have the observables and variables. While they are very good at storing large amounts of information, they will only perform limited functions on that data. However the database can easily pull various data points from several tables and display them all together. This can be useful to develop reports from the given data in different formats.

Depending on what you are doing with your database you can use the SQL to interface with it in a number of ways. You could just use a command line set up where each user needs to use approved commands to get the information they require out of the database. There are also ways to set up your SQL database to function with a GUI (graphic user interface) which can give your users the ability to interact with the data without necessarily knowing specific commands. You can also use SQL with other languages to move data from the database into other programs if you need to manipulate the data in some way.