Business Needs Structure
Business Needs Structure
So far, we've solved how to store files. Photos. Videos. Documents. Backups. But think about an online shopping application. It doesn't just store files. It needs to remember customers, products, orders, payments and inventory. A customer can place many orders. An order can contain many products. A product can belong to many categories. This information isn't just stored. It's connected. The engineering problem was now different. How do we store structured data and preserve the relationships between it? The engineering concept that solved this problem is the Relational Database. Instead of storing information as separate files, data is organized into related tables. These relationships allow applications to answer questions like: "Which orders belong to this customer? " "How many products are left in stock? " "Which payment belongs to this order? " quickly and accurately. Amazon Web Services provides this as Relational Database Service (RDS). Microsoft Azure provides managed relational databases through Azure SQL Database and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and others. Google Cloud provides Cloud SQL. Different names. One engineering concept. Applications could now manage business data without worrying about installing database software, taking backups or maintaining database servers. But another problem soon appeared. Thousands of users were asking the database the same questions every second. Do we really need to query the database every single time?