The Database Model

Databases are programs that people use on a daily basis. They have become one of the most common ways to organize information and retrieve necessary data from a data collection. Although the advance of technology and database software design has made things so easy for the end user, one may want to know how it is that databases actually work. Here one can read more about the database model, the theoretical foundation of any database.

The database model is the part of a database that fundamentally determines the ways in which the data can be stored, organized and manipulated in a database system. The primary aim of the database model is to determined the infrastructure provided by a particular database system. It consists in a theory that describes how the database is structured and used and there are several such models available. These include the hierarchical model, the network model, the relational model, the entity-relationship model, object-relational model as well as the object model. Among these, the most popular model is the relational model.

The relational model was developed in 1970 from an attempt to make a database more independent from other applications. This mathematical model is based on two main concepts which are predicate theory and set theory. A relation is in general defined by a table with columns and rows. The named columns of the relation are referred to as attributes, while the domain is the set of values that attributes may take. For instance, the relational model provides that the particular entity, such as an employee, is represented in rows and columns. The relation however refers to various tables in the database which is in the end a set of rows, otherwise called tuples. The column may, in this case, enumerate the attributes of the employee such as name, address, salary and so on. The row is on the other hand an actual instance of the entity, meaning for this case a specific employee.