Relational Database, the data or information are gathered and arranged as a table with ease of accessing or updating the information without a need to re-assemble the entire table or database structure. Earlier before the conceptualization of relational database, flat file based storage is the database. The information were arranged with a delimiters, like vertical line separated between each other data to distinguish and getting one information from such files need a complete sequential scanning which is a tedious process.

In a relational database, the information are grouped and arranged in the tables with columns and rows. Each row is called a record or a ‘Tuple’. Each column is called as the field or an ‘Attribute’. Each record can have multiple columns as wells each column can have multiple rows. SQL (Structured Query Language) is used to access Relational Database tables. The result of your query made via the SQL statements are called as ‘Result set’ or the ‘Data set’. In relational Database, retrieving information is not tedious like in flat file database models. Simple SQL queries retrieve you the result set you wish to see from your database. You could write the SQL query to retrieve only the specific attribute values, by filtering for specific criteria of records.

A schema is the technical term to refer the database model and RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) is the software architecture that addresses the complete relational database model. The name relational database was coined because each table in the database could be linked with another table the help of some relations.

Example of relational Database:

• Table 1 named as ‘Customer_Sales’. A table to store the information related to customer wise sales on each date
• Table 2 named as ‘Customer Master’ - A table to store the master information of each customer.

These two tables are related to each other with the help of the Customer_ID column, thus they form the relational database system. A typical relational database can have from 10 to 10000 such related tables.

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