- A database is a collection of data that is organized and stored according to some purpose.
- A relational database organizes such data into tables.
It's easier to illustrate this concept than try to explain it. Below is an example of a table that might appear in a book database.
| Table of Books | ||
| ISBN | Title | Author |
| 0-67980527-3 | Oh, The Places You'll Go! | Dr. Seuss |
| 0-553-21037-8 | The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| 0-451-17512-3 | The Fountainhead | Ayn Rand |
| 0-452-28062-1 | Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| 0-374-51199-3 | Cancer Ward | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |
| 1-56592-434-7 | MySQL & mSQL | Randy Yarger, George Reese and Tim King |
The table has a name, several columns, and rows containing data for each of the columns.
A relational database represents data in tables such as this and provides retrieval operations that generate new tables from existing ones. As a result, the programmer sees the database in the form of such tables.