Database

/ ˈdadəˌbās /

Definition

A database is a place to store and organize data like a filing cabinet where any document can be retrieved, added, removed, and/or edited. Imagine you're building the next Twitter, what data would you need to store? Twitter allows you to tweet, re-tweet, follow others, direct message, etc. Almost every feature in Twitter creates new data and stores it so it can be used at a later date. For example, when a user posts a tweet, Twitter stores this tweet in the database. When the user's followers open Twitter to scroll through their feed, Twitter will retrieve the stored tweet and show it on their feed.

How you organize and structure the data within the database is entirely up to you. Here are the common types of databases companies use to help structure their data:

• Relational (SQL)

• Non-relational (NoSQL)

  • Graph database

  • Key-value stores

  • Document stores

  • Columnar data stores

A relational database is very similar to a spreadsheet with rows, columns, and tables. A non-relational database is anything and everything else. Since each database type depends on the use case and has its tradeoffs, one is not generally better than the others.

To learn more about relational vs non-relational databases, check out DigitalOcean's Article!

Used in a sentence

Jr. Dev: What db tables are you querying to retrieve user and billing information?

Lead Dev: prod-user and prod-billing

Related terms

• Tables

• Query

• API

• CRUD

• SQL

• ACID

• NoSQL

• DBMS