Foundations of Databases

Databases are an integral part of modern back-end development. They allow applications to store and retrieve data efficiently and provide powerful querying capabilities. However, interacting with databases requires careful consideration and planning to ensure efficiency, scalability, latency, and performance. While we will not take a deep dive into database internals and system design choices revolving normalization of relational databases or principles of sharding and replication, this lesson will aim to simply highlight the key pointers that we need to consider in our learning journey.

Choosing the right database

The first decision that developers need to make when interacting with databases is choosing the right database for their application. Choosing the right database depends on several factors, including the nature of the data, whether user behavior is predominantly to read or write, the required consistency and scalability guarantees, and the performance requirements of the application, to name a few. There are several types of databases available, each with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. The most common types are given below.

Relational databases

Relational databases store data in tables with predefined schemas and relations between the entities modeled in the schemas. They are strictly and very ...