From the course: Learning Relational Databases

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Break data down into its components

Break data down into its components

From the course: Learning Relational Databases

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Break data down into its components

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- [Instructor] Part of the benefit of having your data stored in a relational database is that it becomes very easy to ask a wide variety of questions about your data. That is, as long as the data structure is well considered. One of the ways to ensure that the database remains flexible in the types of questions that you can ask, is by making the fields as descriptive, and specific, as possible. A side effect of this effort is that the fields also become quite short and to the point. Here's a typical example of how our customer data might be stored in a spreadsheet. In the customers table, we're currently storing the name of the customer and their billing address. And once again, we have a storage structure that works perfectly fine for our immediate business needs. Given this information, we would be able to process a customer's credit card since we have their billing address stored and easily accessible. What's being lost though, is any future or alternate use of this information…

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