Relational database management systems

- [Instructor] When you start splitting your tabular data across multiple tables, it's important to stay organized and ensure that all of the components of your data structure fit together as intended. This is where a Relational Database Management System comes into play. a Relational Database Management System, or RDBMS, for short, gives you the tools that you need in order to build a database to meet your unique set of requirements. Here are just a few of the tasks that an RDBMS will help you out with. A primary importance is the ability to create new data tables and connect them together. The RDBMS will help you to find the columns that make up each table and formerly link them together. Then it'll place rules on the table so that the data that's stored meets your quality expectations. All of this helps ensure that your data is trustworthy and complete. Once the table is created, the RDBMS will help you store and organize your data. It'll build indexes so that you can quickly locate individual pieces of information. And it can make redundant copies of your data or store regular backups to protect against data loss in the face of catastrophic events like a server crash or a natural disaster. Next, the RDBMS secures your data by controlling who has access to it. By managing user logins and permissions, it makes sure that people can read and write data that they're allowed to view and keeps people away from data that they're not authorized to view. And even when people do have permission to access data, the RDBMS can provide logging and auditing tools so that activities can be monitored in order to meet industry compliance and security standards. This is particularly helpful when your database contains sensitive financial or medical data that's often subject to government regulations. So structure, store and secure, those are the three main responsibilities. But this is just a start to the tasks given to the Relational Database Management System. As you can see, a relational database does a lot more than just keep your valuable data in tables. So it's important to choose to work with an RDBMS that's compatible with your requirements. Picking one is a lot like buying a new vehicle. All of the vehicles in the showroom basically do the same thing. They all have four wheels and an engine. But a pickup truck meets a different set of requirements than a sedan or a sports car. Just like different car manufacturers produce different kinds of cars for different kinds of people. There's many different companies that produce competing Relational Database Management Systems that are aimed at different users with different priorities. If you're building a database for a personal project or a small business, then you might be well served with a Desktop RDBMS such as Microsoft Access, FileMaker or Open Office Base. For medium to large businesses and enterprise customers with their own data centers, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL or MySQL might be a better fit. If you want your data stored in the Cloud, so that it's easily accessible from all over the world, you might choose Microsoft Azure SQL Database, Amazon Relational Database, Oracle Database Cloud, or Google Cloud SQL. These are just a few of the major providers of RDBMS software. For a more complete list, take a look at the rankings maintained by DB-Engines.com. Here you can see which platforms are the most popular from month to month, and then click through to each one in order to compare their capabilities against one another. Now, a quick note about this course, and in fact, the entire database foundation series, it's important to me that I make this content as platform independent as possible and not focus on the capabilities of a single platform. I'm mostly going to focus on the core components that are shared across almost all of these options. So it won't matter if you're working on a PC, or a Mac or Linux or using SQL Server or Oracle or one of the Cloud platforms. The concepts that we'll look at in this course will apply to any of these options. Now with that said, though, we do need to pick something that we can play around and experiment with. So I'm going to show you how to set up both a SQL Server and a PostgreSQL RDBMS in the next chapter. That'll give us the tools that we need in order to compare the two platforms to one another and give you a good idea about the breadth of options that are available.