Daytona Beach Database Programming
So what exactly is a database?
At the simplest a database is an organized collection of data. But when a computer programmer refers to a database, usually he is referring to the combination of the organized data and a program that searches through the data and serves it out to programs requesting it.
Why should I use a database? I have Excel right on my desktop.
Excel and other spreadsheet programs work very well for a very wide variety of uses. However, spreadsheets aren’t very good at maintaining very large sets of data. They are very prone to errors, because spreadsheets don’t have any convenient method to validate data entries, and it can be difficult to find a specific entry in the spreadsheet. Databases do not have these limitations and are easier for custom programs to interface with than a spreadsheet.
Okay, so I need a database, but which one?
Which database you choose depends a lot on what you need that database to do for you. If you need to integrate tightly with Microsoft products or a custom program that is written in a .net language, MS-SQL Server is the database for you. If you are writing a web application in PHP, Perl, or Ruby, then a better choice for you may be PostgreSQL or MySQL. Both of these are free/open source products, so they have a price advantage over the MS choice, but why two? Each one has advantages that the other doesn’t.
In most installs, MySQL runs faster by default than PostgreSQL, but PostgreSQL can handle far more complex databases than MySQL is capable of dealing with. Then again, maybe MS-SQL and neither of the free options will work for you, because you have a huge amount of data being sent to and from the database and need to know with absolute certainty that the data is correct and intact, this leads us to Oracle RDBMS, the premier database solution.
Alright, I made my choice, can you help me?
Net Works has 10 years experience working with SQL databases. Our Daytona Beach database programmers can help you from install to design to maintenance. If you have a database concern, we can help you out with it.
Further Reading:
MS-SQL – http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/
MySQL – http://www.mysql.com/
PostgreSQL – http://www.postgresql.org/
Oracle – http://www.oracle.com/