Brief Introduction to Structured Query Language (SQL)

The lecture introduces you to Structured Query Language (SQL) that is used to interface with a relational database management system (RDBMS).

You learn that information from websites and web applications are ultimately stored in a database, so they persist as you come back to the website at a later time.

You learn that the database can have many tables to store different resources. Each table has columns that are attributes of a specific object. Those objects are presented as rows.

In the example, there is a table of customers. Each row represents a customer. Each column represents a piece of information about that customer. For example, the column first_name stores the customer's first name.

There are many implementations of SQL out there. Many companies have built their own flavor. For example: MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, IBM DB2, etc. But so long as you learn standard SQL, you can easily run queries for any of those specific implementations.