WHAT IS A DATABASE?
How Does It All Work?
Although websites are everywhere around us, and seemingly everyone has one, there are many parts that need to work together in order for them to work properly. If you want to learn more about websites and how they work behind the scenes, you came to the right place! This series will break down what happens when you use a website, as well as what goes into building one.
What is a Database?
Some websites are more complex than others. Static websites are ones that do not change frequently. The set of pages are built once, and adjusted by the developer if needed. Dynamic websites can change a lot more easily. A good example of a dynamic website is a blog, where the author can write and add new posts as often as they wish, and as each post is published, it becomes available on the website.
Continuing with the blog example, when an author finishes writing a post and clicks the "save" button, the content of their post, its title, the date it was written, the name of the author, and likely other pieces of information need to be saved somewhere! The database is where user generated content is saved. The database organizes the data so it can be retrieved and shown again quickly when a user requests a certain web page. Some websites only allow people save content to the database, where others (such as popular social media websites) will let anyone create an account and start saving content to the database.
A database is basically a file that keeps the data stored in a structured way. Typically there is a row added for each new peice of data and each column describes how the data should be stored. Look at the following image to see an example of how some of the data is stored on my other website johntheleatherman.com.
The amount of data stored in the databsae can get to be very large, so it is important to be able to retrieve the requested data very quickly. Try to imaging how many Tweets have been saved on Twitter's databases, or how many images have been uploaded to Facebook. All of this data is sitting in a database until it needs to be shown again someday.
What's Next?
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What is a Domain Name?If this page left you wondering about other parts of web development, check out the answers to some other common questions below!