Introduction
In the early years of databases, every application stored data in its own unique structure. When developers wanted to build applications to use that data, they had to know a lot about the particular data structure to find the data they needed. These data structures were inefficient, hard to maintain, and hard to optimize for delivering good application performance. The relational database model was designed to solve the problem of multiple arbitrary data structures. The relational model provided a standard way of representing and querying data that could be used by any application. From the beginning, developers recognized that the chief strength of the relational database model was in its use of tables, which were an intuitive, efficient, and flexible way to store and access structured information.
The simple yet powerful relational model is used by organizations of all types and sizes for a broad variety of information management needs. Relational databases are used to track inventories, process ecommerce transactions, manage huge amounts of mission-critical customer information, and much more. A relational database is useful for storing any information containing related data elements that must be organized in a rules-based, consistent way.
In this module, you'll learn about the key characteristics of relational data, and explore relational data structures.
Learning objectives
In this module you will:
- Explore the characteristics of relational data
- Define tables, indexes, and views
- Explore relational data workload offerings in Azure