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Relational vs Non-Relational

Relational vs Non-Relational

This lesson talks about the database landscape as it exists today in the industry.

Relational vs Non-Relational

There is a plethora of terms and jargon that can be confusing when first starting to read about data and its storage. We’ll provide clarification on various terms below:

Data

Data (plural of datum) is defined as distinct pieces of information.

Data can exist in several different forms: numbers, text, bytes, Instagram pictures, or YouTube videos. These represent various types of data that can be stored and transmitted electronically. Note that data is usually interpreted in a context, e.g., a data representing prose in the Hindi language can’t be interpreted as a picture and vice versa.

There are broadly three categories of data:

  1. Structured Data: has some pre-defined organizational property about it that makes it easily searchable and analyzable. The data is backed by a model that dictates the size of each field of the data: its type, length, and any restrictions on what values it can take on.

    Data stored in SQL databases is structured. Structured data is usually formatted in a universally understandable and identifiable manner. In most instances, a schema formally specifies structured data. Whenever you are working in any variant of SQL, you are almost always dealing with structured data. ...