From the course: Database Foundations: Intro to Databases
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Storing data efficiently
From the course: Database Foundations: Intro to Databases
Storing data efficiently
- [Instructor] I mentioned that a spreadsheet could be considered a type of database, but that it isn't the best choice from an efficiency perspective when you need to store large amounts of data. Let's explore this a little bit by taking a look at some data about people and their pets. Here, I have a single data table, or what's sometimes referred to as a flat file database. It has columns that define the type of information that we're storing, and then we have four different rows of actual data. This allows me to store an owner's first and last name, their phone number, their pet's name, and the type of animal that it is. Reading across each row, I can easily see that Macy Bishop has three pets, and that Elijah Knight has one. If you count up all of the data cells in this table, you'll see that there are 20 cells needed to store all of this information when it's structured in a single table. Now let's rearrange things…
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