Building a dynamic home for information
Many websites need a custom database
When Web Costa Blanca is building your website and the project involves a database, this service is included as a costed part of the project.
Get the essentials to your visitors
Why a database?
Can’t websites work without databases? Yes, they can—as long they are static. In other words, as long as they can stay as they are whatever visitors want to do, and need updating only at long intervals.
Many (perhaps most) websites need to interact with their visitors, to receive new information from them and to present them with up-to-date information. In other words, they are dynamic.
Database design—‘conceptual’ and ‘logical’
Even the smallest database benefits from being carefully designed. It will do its job more efficiently, like a well-designed machine.
in the case of databases, this first means identifying all the people and things and events on which information needs to be kept. In the jargon of database design, these are ‘entities’.
The next job is to work out the exact relationship between these entities in the real world—like ‘sells to’, or ‘studies under’ or ‘gave birth to’ (the list of possible relationships is almost endless).
At the same time the relationship needs to be defined as one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many. (An individual company sells to many buyers; a student studies under individual teachers; a parent may have given birth to more than one child.)
Next, each entity has to have its attributes listed. Name, colour, price, date ready, size, importance …
Database design—‘physical’
Now the final work begins. Entities become tables and every table gets a unique key; relationships between tables are set up using these keys; both these keys and the defined attributes become columns of the tables.
When this is done using code, such as MySQL, and everything has been “normalised” (to minimise redundancy and prevent anomalies) a computer database is born.
Oh, and rows (records) can now be inserted!
What about ‘no code’ design?
You will find many applications which promise you database design without coding. And, to be fair, they can help you with the final stage of design: the physical.
What is more, they can offer you all sorts of impressive and colourful “views” of your database.
The catch is that this is not the part where novice designers need help. The critical parts of design are the conceptual and the logical.
There are applications which will help you with these parts, and allow you to create and explore many attractive displays. I am myself fond of MySQL Workbench (see illustration below).
The catch is that you need to be able to code in MySQL to use a tool like this. And, to be honest, for an advanced tool like MySQL Workbench to be of real use to you, you probably need to have already coded at least one database using nothing but MySQL commands (whether completely at the command line or with the help of a tool like phpMyAdmin).
So you can learn MySQL—or you can call on the services of a professional who has been at home with MySQL for years, and has already built (and maintained) many databases for many different kinds of website …
Web Costa Blanca Database Design
Your options
You can start the ball rolling by signing up to Web Costa Blanca now. (It’s free, and will only take a few minutes.)
