Chapter 8. keys and Data Relationships: Thoughtful Table Design
Calling all architects and designers. You’ve been constructing tables without giving them much thought. And that’s fine, they work. You can do all the CRUD operations on them and write SELECT statements that are as elaborate as necessary. But as you get more data, you’ll start seeing things you wish you’d done to make your WHERE clauses simpler. Or perhaps your single table just isn’t big enough anymore, and you need to renovate your floor plans a bit. As your data becomes more complex, the KEY is to make your tables atomic and divide your data into multiple related tables. Who knows? Maybe your optimal blueprints result in plans for an entire skyscraper. Read on to find out.
Do you know the state of San Jose?
Mistakes happen, but luckily, Abby learned about UPDATE in Chapter 5. She can use it to add “CA” as San Jose’s state value:
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
