Introduction to Databases for web developers

Types of Database

These days, when you talk about databases in the wild, you are primarily talking about two types:

• Analytical databases
• Operational databases.

Let's examine each type

Analytic databases (a.k.a. OLAP- On Line Analytical Processing) are primarily static, read-only databases which store archived, historical data used for analysis. For example, a company might store sales records over the last ten years in an analytic database and use that database to analyze marketing strategies in relationship to demographics.

On the web, you will often see analytic databases in the form of inventory catalogs such as the one shown on the previous page from Amazon.com. An inventory catalog analytical database usually holds descriptive information about all available products in the inventory.

Web pages are generated dynamically by querying the list of available products in the inventory against some search parameters. The dynamically-generated page will display the information about each item (such as title, author, ISBN) which is stored in the database.

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