Relational Database: a basic understanding

What is a Relational Database?

It’s a database based on Relational Model. Which was proposed by E.F. Codd

Now in a relational model, the data is stored in the form of tables which look something like this example.

So, the catch here is "the data is stored logically in tabular form".

Table shown in above picture gives the details (i.e. Name, age and city) of three persons and it contains the rows and columns where

• Each Row represents a record having information about a person. e.g. The last row contains Name, Age and City of Katie.


• Each Column represents a category of information. e.g. The second column contains age of all the persons in the example.

So, Basically a Relational database is a collection of such enties which contain data in tabular form as explained in above example.

Now, to use and manage such relational databases (like Oracle, SQL server, etc.), the standard language is SQL (Structured Query language)