Summary

Our current society thrives on data. People sometimes say, "Data is the new gold." Even though most of the digital data we create is not stored in databases (think about movies, music, pictures…), databases play a crucial role in our information-driven world.

It is important to consider what you want to do with your data and what the nature of your data is. Choose the right system for the job, whether that is a NoSQL database or a relational database. Choose the proper modeling technique to set up your database.

In this chapter, you learned mostly about relational databases, although much of what has been covered applies to databases in general. A relational database is a database based on set theory, where data is stored as rows in tables. Rows should be unique in tables. We use a primary key to enforce uniqueness, and we use foreign keys to relate tables to one another.

The best way to design a database depends on its intended usage. We will cover this in detail in Chapter 3, Normalizing Data, and in Chapter 7, Dimensional Modeling.

The next chapter focuses on entity analysis. Entity analysis is about what to store and how to store it.