SQL Tutorials for Beginners (Part 1)

The purpose is to provide you with all the information you need about SQL. We will begin with the basics and then move on to more advanced techniques. Step-by-step, you will learn how to write SQL queries to retrieve specific information, update some information, and many other such things.

We will install the MySQL relational database management system. It's a handy tool to start learning databases as a beginner and is one of the most popular database management systems.

A database is any collection of related information, like our shopping list, to-do list, etc. If we talk about the Amazon.com database, then it keeps track of products, reviews, purchase orders, media, etc. Trillions of pieces of information are stored in Amazon's database.

Now, you might be confused by the term database management system (DBMS) because we have used this term before. So, DBMS is a special software program that helps users create and maintain a database.

It makes it easy to manage a large amount of information.

Backups of data

Handles security

The database management system is not the actual database, it's a software application.

As shown below, amazon.com will interact with DBMS to create, read, update, and delete, etc information from the database.

Generally, the most basic operations performed on a database are create, read, update, and delete (C.R.U.D).

There are two types of databases:

Relational Database (SQL)

Non-Relational Database (NoSQL / not just SQL)

Organize data into one or more tables.

Each table has rows and columns.

A unique key identifies each row.

Relational database management systems (RDBMS) are used to create and maintain a relational database. Some examples of RDBMS are MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, etc.

SQL (Structured Query Language) is used for interacting with RDBMS.

It does not use traditional tables of rows and columns to store information.

It uses Key-value, JSON, graphs, flexible tables, XML, etc to store data.

Non-relational database management systems (NRDBMS) are used to create and maintain a non-relational database. Some examples of NRDBMS are MongoDB, DynamoDB, Apache Cassandra, Firebase, etc.

As the database structure becomes more and more complex, it becomes more difficult to get the specific pieces of information that we want. So queries are requests made to the database management system to retrieve specific data.

In Google search, we type our search query to get all the results we want. Similarly, to get a particular result from the tables in the database, we write a query (like SQL queries).

In this tutorial, we looked at database management systems, types of databases with some real-life examples, etc. We also talked about relational and non-relational databases, and database queries to query a database. We will be diving deeper into SQL in the upcoming parts, so till then keep learning.