What Is Database Technology - 2023 Guide To Database Tech - Upwork

5/25/23, 1:22 PM What Is Database Technology?
2023 Guide to Database Tech | Upwork
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5/25/23, 1:22 PM What Is Database Technology? 2023 Guide to Database Tech | Upwork
Databases store, organize, and process information in a way that makes it

easy for us to go back and find what we’re looking for. We encounter data
sets, both simple and complex, all the time, whether in the form of library
card catalogs, financial records, and even contact directories. But what
are databases in the context of a website?
In this quick guide to modern database technology, you’ll get an

understanding of how databases work, common terms to know, a look at
SQL vs. NoSQL, and how to determine which database is best for your
web application.
Use the links below to quickly get to where you want to start:
A quick overview of modern database technology

Increasing complexity: Single-file vs. multi-file databases
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Your Business
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A quick overview of modern

the Difference?
database technology
Spreadsheets process numbers and databases process information—
Popular Articles
specifically, structured information. Databases can be designed to do just

about anything with information, such as:
Track, organize, and edit data
Collect data and produce reports, or

Be the foundation for information-rich, dynamic websites
The most common database technology today is the relational database.

Relational databases store data in a normalized way—that means the data
is split up into different tables to avoid redundancy. While relational
databases have been around for quite a while now, they offer a versatile
tool for both data storage and data management. Both user-facing
applications with high demands on performance and reporting software
can be backed by a relational database.
However, there are cases when relational databases might not be your
first choice. One case is when the rigid structure of the data in a relational
database does not fit the data that you want to store. For example, you
might want to store a JSON document without a specified schema. It
could, for example, be a configuration file or some form of user-generated
data. This is when NoSQL databases are useful. The data is usually
queried using an API or SDK instead of SQL, hence the name NoSQL.
These databases usually also provide very fast access to the stored data.
Instead of the database engine having to parse SQL and join together the
data you specified in your query, NoSQL databases are tuned to instantly
fetch the requested data through their API.
Increasing complexity: Single-

file vs. multi-file databases
Take the contact directory, for example: It’s got items of information like
names, addresses, and phone numbers, all organized in the same format
—in this particular case, we’ll say it’s all collected on a single spreadsheet.
In database terms, the spreadsheet with the information is the table, each
person is a record, and their name, address, and phone number are all
fields. The last name—how the directory is organized, alphabetically—is
the key field, which sorts the records. Because the last name was chosen
as the key field, that’s how the directory is sorted; sorting by phone
number or house number wouldn’t generate what we were looking for and
we’d never find anything out of the thousands of entries.
That’s one cornerstone of database technology: smart sorting.
But a directory is just a flat, single-file database. When would you need
more complex databases with multiple tables that can interact with one
another? Let’s say you want a shipment status update on an order you
placed with an e-commerce site. That website has multi-file databases set
up for orders, dates, payments, shipment tracking, inventory, suppliers,
and customers. By linking these tables together, if a query is made about

an order’s status, the database can generate a report with data from the
tables:
“[Customer]’s order of [product] purchased with a [payment method] on

[purchase date] is being shipped to [address] via [method], due to arrive
[tracking date].”
This type of structure usually means that a relational database is the

preferred choice. Querying a relational database to get the orders for a
customer could look like this:
SELECT * FROM customers WHERE id=1 INNER JOIN orders ON

orders.customer_id = customers.id
Relational databases and

database management systems:
Building powerful data-driven
websites
The foundation for modern database technology began in the 1970s with
the first “relational data model.” Its emphasis was on careful organization.
Today, relational databases remain important to how websites are built;
any website that displays data from a database has to have:
Server-side scripting
HTML and CSS

SQL, a database language
A database management system (DBMS)
For example, if we go back to the e-commerce site above, a page on that

site might display a customer's orders by using the example SQL query.
The page would be rendered to the user with HTML and CSS while the
server-side handles the connection to the database, runs the query, and
returns the data to be displayed to the user. The database management
system is the engine that runs the database and enables the server side
code to communicate with the database.
Here’s a quick look at how both SQL and

DBMSs affect database technology:
Relational databases consist of two or more tables with connected
information, each with columns and rows. These connected tables are
called database objects; to create and manage them, you need a relational
database management system (RDBMS). RDBMSs allow relational
database developers to create and maintain a database program,
including tools to:
Query data
Edit data
Design the entire database structure
Produce reports
Validate data points and check for inconsistencies
They often include a built-in programming language to automate

some of these functions, such as SQL.
Querying for data in a relational database is, as mentioned, most

commonly done using a variant of SQL. Using a query language such as
SQL, you can fetch data based on the value of a specific column, join
related data onto the result, perform advanced calculations, format the
data in the way you prefer, and more.
Editing data can also be done using SQL. By executing a query, you can
create rows, update rows, and delete rows based on criteria that you
define. For example, if you want to update the shipping status of all orders
that were placed on a specific date, you could use the below query:
UPDATE orders SET status = "SENT" where date = "2023-01-23"
Designing the structure of the database is also done using SQL. The
structure of a relational database is made up of tables, columns, indices,
and constraints. A table stores data of a certain type, for instance, orders
in the e-commerce example above. Columns are the properties for the
entities in the table. A table that holds orders might have columns like
date, status, and customer_id. Indices optimize the way you can query the
data. For example, if orders are usually queried for by the customer_id,
you most likely want to define an index for the customer_id column.
Constraints are rules for the data stored in the columns. For example,
some columns might not be allowed to be left empty. For the orders
example, customer_id again might not be allowed to be empty so that we
make sure all orders are connected to a customer. Constraints are helpful
to make sure no invalid data is allowed to be stored in the database.
SQL: The language of database

access
Structured Query Language (SQL) is a standardized programming
language for accessing and manipulating databases. In an RDBMS like
MySQL, Sybase, Oracle, or IMB DM2, SQL writes programming that can
manage data and stream data processing. SQL is like a database’s own
version of a server-side script and is responsible for:
Executing queries, which are “questions” asked of the database
Retrieving data
Editing data: inserting, updating, deleting, or creating new records
Creating views
Setting permissions
Creating new databases
SQL is a standard programming language but has a number of variations

—including some databases’ own proprietary SQL extensions.
Note: When it comes to creating new databases from the ground up,
planning ahead is key. In the same way you need to plan ahead for the
future of your site when choosing a software stack, how your database is
structured from day one will have major implications for the health of your
site down the road. Questions to consider include:
What information will you have?

How should it be stored?
What data will your site need to retrieve regularly, and how?
When you have decided on the information that you will store in your
database, it is time to define a data model or schema. This means you
translate the different kinds of information into tables and columns and
connect them to each other. The goal for the schema when you are
working with a relational database is to make sure no information is stored
twice in the database. Instead, one piece of information should be stored
in it's own table and referenced by other tables. One example of this is the
orders table that references the customers table using the customer_id
key.
NoSQL databases: Non-

relational and distributed data
Relational databases are great at organizing and retrieving structured
data, but what happens when your data is inconsistent, incomplete, or
massive? In these cases, you need a more flexible database solution. As
the kinds and amounts of data that we gather have exploded, the NoSQL
database has evolved to solve the challenges of Big Data. These
databases are non-relational and distributed. They deviate from the
traditional relational model, addressing the issue that most modern data
harvested from the web is not structured information. NoSQL lends
flexibility, scalability, and variety—major advantages from a business
standpoint, when you consider that growing data is a direct result of a
growing business.
How does a NoSQL database work? Instead of tables, NoSQL databases

are document-oriented. This way, non-structured data (such as articles,
photos, social media data, videos, or an entire blog post) can be stored in
a single document that can be easily found but isn’t necessarily
categorized into a bunch of pre-set fields.
While NoSQL databases provide a lot of flexibility when developing

modern applications, they might not always be your first choice. Relational
databases with their strictly defined schemas enable easy querying of the
data in almost any way you can think of. You can query any column in the
database, join any related data onto the result, and use the result set in
your application or export it as a spreadsheet. NoSQL databases are
usually limited to querying by a predefined primary key that retrieves the
entire document stored using the key. Some NoSQL databases, however,
enable you to define multiple keys that you can query and sort by. They do
not reach the level of query flexibility that a relational database does,
however. The upside of this technical design is that performance is highly
optimized and can reach single-digit millisecond response times if you
define your keys and queries according to best practices. Read more
about the difference between SQL and NoSQL databases.
In-memory databases
An in-memory database is one that uses memory for data storage instead
of on a disk or an SSD. The benefits of using this type of database include:
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more easily and at a cheaper rate.
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No one-size-fits-all: If you’re switching to in-memory computing,

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The use cases for these types of databases are those that require
microsecond response times and see large spikes in traffic, such as real-
time applications and caching layers.
Common database terms to

know
Here are a few major database characteristics that are helpful to know
when weighing one type of database against another—aspects like how
databases grow, protect against failure, duplicate data for speed, safety,
and accessibility.
Scalability
Scalability refers to the ability to scale out or scale up your database so

you can hold more data without sacrificing performance. Some questions
to think about when deciding how you scale include:
How much do you expect your data to grow (and how soon)?
Do you need a highly scalable database that will be reliable even as

the amount of data you’re processing grows exponentially?
Will one server be enough or do you anticipate needing to add
additional ones?
Do you need horizontal scaling or vertical scaling?
When considering scalability, make sure to research the possibilities that

you have with your hosting provider. If you are using one of the largest
cloud providers, you should be able to set up automatic scaling of your
database from a single cheap instance for your development workloads to
multiple large instances for your production workloads.
Sharding
Related to horizontal scaling, sharding is a technique for storing massive
databases across multiple servers. It achieves this by splitting different
rows into different tables. For instance, a database of customer names
might store customers with last names starting with letters A through M
on one shard, while N through Z are stored on another. Sharding can help
minimize response times for queries while also allowing data to be stored
across a large number of cost-effective servers.
Replication
Replication is the process of frequent copying of data from one database
onto other databases on other servers. Using replication, you could, for
example, have one database instance that is used for writing data and one
instance that is used for reading data. This can improve the response
times and capacity of your database significantly if your site needs real-
time access to update and synchronize data.
Latency
Latency refers to the time it takes for data to complete a “round trip”
between the database server and the application server. When an app
queries its database for data, this is how long it takes the server to return
that data. The lower the latency, the better, but low latency often comes at
a cost to other features, like consistency and availability.
A simple way to ensure that the latency is as low as possible between your
application and your database is to make sure your database server is as
close to your application server as possible. Another way is to investigate
how your application queries data in your database and optimize the
database schema accordingly by using indices, for example.
Consistency
When writing to a database, it’s important that changes to the data don’t
violate the rules of the database. Consistency ensures that transactions
don’t produce errors that can make the entire database invalid. A fully
consistent system means that as soon you successfully write a record to a
database, you’ll also be able to request it. This is especially important for
things like financial transactions. Consistency comes at a cost to speed
and availability, however. That’s why many NoSQL databases opt for an
eventually consistent model that allows for faster reading and writing.
Availability
Availability refers to whether the system is able to quickly respond to a
request, even when failures occur. For example, you could set up a
secondary database instance that is periodically synced with your
primary instance. This second instance could then be used as the primary
instance should it go down. The downside of this is that databases that
are spread across multiple servers can result in out-of-date or incorrect
data being displayed, especially in an eventually consistent system.
Depending on your business needs, however, slightly out-of-date data
may be preferable to delays that prevent the whole system from
functioning.
Fault-tolerance
Failures are inevitable, but there are plenty of contingency plans you can
put into place to ensure that data is still available and your app doesn’t
crash. Having “no single point of failure” ensures that an app can keep
functioning without interruption, usually through replication or
redundancy. Databases do this differently, with varying degrees of cost
and footprint.
To help you evaluate which database to choose based on these

characteristics, make sure to look for database freelancers on Upwork.
There, you can find database professionals who have worked with many
different database technologies.
New trends in database

technologies in 2023
In some industries, the primary databases used have barely changed in
the last decade. However, with the ever-increasing amounts of data we
store, new ways to store and retrieve that data are needed. In this section,
we will go through some of the newest trends we’ve seen.
Cloud databases
Traditionally, database servers were run in data warehouses owned by the

company using the database. In recent years, the public cloud providers’
solutions for hosting databases have become the standard. When hosting
a database in the cloud, you do not need to worry about the infrastructure
backing the database and you can utilize many different tools to scale,
configure, and manage it.
Some ways businesses are using cloud databases is to host information

you want multiple team members to have access to—particularly if you
are a hybrid workforce—and to easily expand the amount of storage they
need quickly instead of taking the time to buy new servers.
Database automation
Database automation refers to different processes and tools used to
make administrative tasks of a database more efficient. Instead of
manually creating backups, scaling infrastructure, and updating the
schema, there are many different tools to automate these types of tasks.
Most cloud hosting providers include automation tools in their offerings.
When it comes to your business, an example of database automation is

continually organizing your data when anything new is added. Another
form of automation is running automatic backups to ensure your
collection of data doesn’t go missing in case there is a server failure.
Scaling database data for businesses

As your business scales, so will the data that you manage within your
business. In the past, this might mean that you would simply add a new
table to the huge relational database that holds all of your business data.
Today, there might be better solutions depending on the type of data that
you want to store. For example, you might need a NoSQL database for
unstructured business data that you need to access in a highly performant
way. This new database can then live in parallel with other specialized
databases and the data can be accessed by different applications as they

need it.
In practice, this could mean rethinking how you scale your data storage.
For instance, your business could scale up and buy more physical storage.
You can also choose to scale horizontally, meaning you add more memory
instead of physical storage.
Increase in database security

Information security has never been as relevant as it is today. The many
leaks that we have seen from huge companies have impacted millions of
people and increased the awareness of security concerns for the average
person.
During the last few years, many new tools for database security have
emerged. For example, many businesses rely on encryption provided by
large cloud providers to help protect their data. There are also more
traditional ways you can approach protecting your data, like limiting how
many people have access to your data.
Next steps
Now that you’ve got an overview of database technology, who do you
need to help you build and maintain your database systems? Relational
and non-relational database management systems can get extremely
complicated and definitely require upkeep.
While anyone can manage a single-file database on their own through

Microsoft Azure, you’ll want to hire a capable database architect to
manage your RDBMS or NoSQL database management. Explore
database administrators on Upwork today.
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5/25/23, 1:22 PM What Is Database Technology?

2023 Guide to Database Tech | Upwork

Databases store, organize, and process information in a way that makes it

In this quick guide to modern database technology, you’ll get an

A quick overview of modern database technology

SQL: The language of database access

Common database terms to know 6 Ways to Integrate AI Into

A quick overview of modern

specifically, structured information. Databases can be designed to do just

Track, organize, and edit data

Collect data and produce reports, or

The most common database technology today is the relational database.

Increasing complexity: Single-

That’s one cornerstone of database technology: smart sorting.

and customers. By linking these tables together, if a query is made about

“[Customer]’s order of [product] purchased with a [payment method] on

This type of structure usually means that a relational database is the

SELECT * FROM customers WHERE id=1 INNER JOIN orders ON

Relational databases and

HTML and CSS

A database management system (DBMS)

For example, if we go back to the e-commerce site above, a page on that

Here’s a quick look at how both SQL and

Design the entire database structure

They often include a built-in programming language to automate

Querying for data in a relational database is, as mentioned, most

UPDATE orders SET status = "SENT" where date = "2023-01-23"

SQL: The language of database

Executing queries, which are “questions” asked of the database

Editing data: inserting, updating, deleting, or creating new records

Creating new databases

SQL is a standard programming language but has a number of variations

What information will you have?

NoSQL databases: Non-

How does a NoSQL database work? Instead of tables, NoSQL databases

While NoSQL databases provide a lot of flexibility when developing

No one-size-fits-all: If you’re switching to in-memory computing,

Common database terms to

Scalability refers to the ability to scale out or scale up your database so

Do you need a highly scalable database that will be reliable even as

When considering scalability, make sure to research the possibilities that

To help you evaluate which database to choose based on these

New trends in database

Traditionally, database servers were run in data warehouses owned by the

Some ways businesses are using cloud databases is to host information

When it comes to your business, an example of database automation is

Scaling database data for businesses

databases and the data can be accessed by different applications as they

Increase in database security

While anyone can manage a single-file database on their own through

Take the first step

For Clients For Talent Resources Company

How to Hire How to Find Work Help & Support About Us

Follow us Mobile app

© 2015 - 2023 Upwork® Global Terms of Privacy CA Notice at Cookie

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