Blog 3: Uses for Relational Databases Article
Posted by Sarah Leichty
Relational Database
- Relational databases could help with my research when I am in the process of data analysis. Since I haven’t done any real data analysis yet besides small excel spreadsheet projects for environmental science classes, I foresee relational databases as being great for any real-time analysis that I may need to do in the future. Learning about this now is a great opportunity to save myself time and stress in the future if I choose to pursue a higher degree.
- A feature that might make relational databases a poor fit for me would be when I have a large amount of data and need to spend a lot of time planning and organizing how I want to set up the relational database. Also, I looked up some other information on relational databases and many appear to cost money to use. Seeing as I am a poor college student, I try to use relatively cheap or free options for my school work. For this same reason, I would like to use software options and programs that don’t require a lot of funds as well.
- Other types of databases that I found are non-relational and graph databases. In the article, non-relational (NoSQL) databases were said to be good fits for data when that data is growing quickly or doesn’t easily conform to categories. While searching for other databases, I found that graph databases are useful when many queries requiring joins are needed. In this type of database, each entity in a graph database has a list associated with it that details how it connects to other nodes. In that way, the expensive searching and matching that I alluded to in question 2 is avoided. This process not only saves money but appears to save time as well since relationships within the database are structured before they are in relational databases from what I could tell from articles on the web.
Here is a gif that made me giggle today, so I thought it would be appropriate to include.
