MySQL The MySQL database server is the world’s most popular open source database server. Over six million installations use the MySQL database server to power high volume websites and other mission critical business systems including industry leaders like NASA, Yahoo, The Associated Press (AP), Suzuki, and Sabre Holdings. MySQL is an attractive alternative to high cost, more complex database technology. Its award winning reliability, scalability, and speed make it the right choice for a wide range of corporate IT departments, web developers, and software vendors. MySQL offers several key advantages: Read More

Data Management is a broad field of study, but essentially is the process of managing data as a resource that is valuable to an organization or business. One of the largest organizations that deal with data management, DAMA (Data Management Association), states that data management is the process of developing data architectures, practices, and procedures dealing with data and then executing these aspects on a regular basis. There are many topics within data management, some of the more popular topics include data modeling, data warehousing, data movement, database administration, and Read More

A BLOB (Binary Large OBject) is a large chunk of data which is stored in a database. A BLOB differs from regular database data in that it is not forced into a certain structure. A normal database field might be structured to be 14 characters long and only accept lowercase letters. A BLOB field is not usually restricted in content type and content can be several gigabytes in size. Normal database fields have space allocated for them whether they are utilized or not. BLOB fields are only allocated space when Read More

A relational database stores data in separate tables instead of placing all data in one large table. It then allows Data Base Administrators (DBAs) to define relationships between these tables. These relationships enable DBAs to combine data from several tables for querying and reporting. This is accomplished through the use of keys, which are database fields used to uniquely identify specific records in a table. Relational database technology allows databases to be larger, faster, and more efficient. Dr. Edger F. (Ted) Codd first developed the concept of a relational database Read More