Re: relational databases

>can someone here give me a brief primer on relational databases? i've
heard the term before, and i'm curious as to what exactly constitutes a relational database.<

Ignore Waleed and Ambalika. Both of their answers are completely wrong. James' answer is the closest to correct.

First, one must understand the difference between a database and a DBMS: A database is a set of known (or believed) facts suitably represented for machine processing, and a DBMS (short for database management system) is a computer system which manages databases.

A relational DBMS, or RDBMS, is a DBMS that represents all data in a database as values in relations.

A relation is approximately equivalent to the mathematical concept of relation. A relation has a header consisting of a set of N named, typed attributes and a body consisting of a set of N-dimensional tuples where each tuple dimension value corresponds to one of the named, typed attributes.

One can represent a relation on paper (or on a computer screen) as a table of values where each row corresponds to a tuple, each column corresponds to a named attribute and each cell contains some value stored in the relation. Received on Fri Jun 07 2002 - 00:40:07 CDT