LinuxFest Northwest 2018: Tables And Columns And Rows! Oh My!
Channel: linuxfestnorthwest
Date: 2018-05-02

Basil Bourque

You’ve got data. Like people’s names, phones, and email addresses. Or customers’ orders. Or animals making visits to your veterinary office. Or a history of timestamped events.

You want to keep that data organized. Available for searching. And sorting.

So now it is time for a database to store all that data. Let's take a breezy tour of how to make a row for each person or order, how to define columns to store the date of each animal’s visit, and how to organize all those rows and columns into a table capable of searching and sorting.

Get a taste for using the simple but powerful SQL language as a way to add records, search and sort those records, and delete them too.

Get a sense of database design, how to translate your business problem into a database solution.

Learn the meaning of “primary key” and “foreign key” to see how they link tables.

We will be using the excellent Postgres database engine, but the concepts presented here apply to any relational database including MySQL, H2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle.