Generally, a database acts as the primary location to keep your web application data to be accessible from frontend interfaces or any third-party systems. Planning and designing the database should be one of the highest priority tasks in the initial stages of a project.

As developers, we have the chance to design the database from scratch in many web applications. WordPress comes with a prestructured database, and hence, the task of planning the table structure and adapting to existing tables becomes much more complex than everyone thinks. Throughout this chapter, we will focus on the basics of planning and accessing database for web applications. This chapter is important for the rest of the book and can appear theoretical compared to other chapters.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: