Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Databases

Key Database Terminology

A complete glossary of database terminology can be found in Appendix C, “Glossary.” At the expense of being redundant, it is beneficial at this time to acquaint you with the most common and essential terms you will encounter not only in this book, but in all the database-related work you perform.

Database

Early in this chapter, a database was described as a collection of related data elements. More precisely, a database is a collection of related data tables or entities. For example, a typical database for an organization would consist of a customer, an order, and order line-item tables. All these tables are related to one another in some way. In this example, customers have orders and orders have line items. Even ...