I have a fair understanding but I want to hear it from people with more experience. Thank you.
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1I was going to vote to migrate to dba.SE, but really, it will just be closed there, so "off-topic" it is. – Wooble Dec 13 '12 at 14:47
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ouch, looks like I came to the wrong neck of the woods. reminder to not post here again. – Ceelos Dec 13 '12 at 14:48
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It helps to elaborate on a particular issue you're facing, as SO is focused on answering specific programming issues... Are you trying to decide how to setup a database with multiple tables and what structure they should have? – jamis0n Dec 13 '12 at 14:51
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I'm not really designing anything yet, I barely got started on tables. I posted this question just for general knowledge and to elaborate on the book I've been reading. – Ceelos Dec 13 '12 at 14:54
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@jamis0n I'll stick to yahoo answers next time. I just liked this site cause it's all about programming but looks like my question didn't go over easy heh. – Ceelos Dec 13 '12 at 14:56
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Be careful comparing SO to Yahoo answers... ;) That won't go over easy either! Do some reading and come back to SO when you have a specific question about "why isn't this query working?" or "is this design better than that one?"... Good luck! – jamis0n Dec 13 '12 at 15:02
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@jamis0n I just had a general question out of curiosity. I'm not doing queries yet and my winter semester is over so I'm not going to be looking at this for the next month. I was actually just reading on this and was curious to see if I was right. I actually got some pretty good responses from yahoo answers might I add. – Ceelos Dec 13 '12 at 15:05
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2Ceelos - you would get a much warmer reception here at SO if your question was less open-ended. People here like specific questions that have a specific answer. Also, people like to see some indication of prior research effort. SO isn't meant to be a place to start a discussion. You could try chat at dba.SE or even chat at programmers.SE to ask a question this broad, or as you say, go to a site like Yahoo Answers that doesn't have so many rules about what is and isn't allowed. I'm sorry you've had a frustrating experience here. – Joel Brown Dec 13 '12 at 15:08
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@JoelBrown Thank you for stating that. You're the first person that tells me about dba.SE – Ceelos Dec 13 '12 at 15:10
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I give you one simple example suppose you have employee table like below EmpId Name Adress 1 A1 Olaf Vei 2 A2 Rosenhoff 3 A3 Olaf vei
Now emp 1 and 3 have same address. Suppose if you feel address is wrong and want to update the address then you have to use update statement to change addree for those emp. Instead if you have foriegn key for Address then you can just that record and will be done automatically for both employees.
having relational database makes life easier. I hope you are satisfied
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Read here about the concept of a relational database model.
A relational database allows the definition of data structures, storage and retrieval operations and integrity constraints. In such a database the data and relations between them are organized into tables. A table is a collection of records and each record in a table contains the same fields.1 The contents of a table can be permanently saved for future use.
jamis0n
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Having relational database is really helpful. If you have just one table then it will be very difficult to insert the records. Although search will be quite faster if you just have 1 table because then you avoid joins. It depends how complex your database structure will be.
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Right thank you. So far we've just begun so we're using pretty small tables (haven't really gone past working with one) – Ceelos Dec 13 '12 at 14:50
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To store data in scaleable, maintainable, structured way.
See this: Normalization in plain English
And, i believe if you know why RDBMS is preferred over flat files. The same answer applied to your question also.
