Flask By Example

Understanding relational databases

In its simplest form, a relational database management system, such as MySQL, is a glorified spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel. We use it to store data in rows and columns. Every row is a "thing" and every column is a specific piece of information about the "thing" in the relevant row. I put "thing" in inverted commas because we're not limited to storing objects. In fact, the most common example of a thing, both in the real world and in explaining databases, is data about people. A basic database storing information about customers of an e-commerce website could look something similar to the following:

ID	First name	Surname	E-mail address	Telephone
1	Frodo	Baggins	[e-mail]	+1 111 ...