Database Fundamentals for Cloud Architects
Explore key database fundamentals essential for cloud architects, including database types, transactions, synchronization, ACID compliance, and scaling techniques. Learn how these concepts apply to building scalable and highly available applications on AWS using managed services like RDS.
In this lesson, we will talk about a few important concepts and terms regarding databases. We’ll discuss the different types of databases and how they handle scalability and high availability.
Database fundamentals
A database is a structured and systematic collection of
A database stores data electronically.
Database management systems (DBMSs) help us store and effortlessly retrieve data from a database. We can use them to create, manage, and alter the database.
A database management system (DBMS) is software to access and manage data in a database.
In reality, both terms are used more loosely, so if you hear a software engineer talk about a database, they could be referring to the database and/or the DBMS. In this course, we’ll use the term “database” for both database and DBMS as well because in reality, both are inseparable.
Databases are usually accessed through a database-specific protocol or interface and these interfaces are normally protected by authentication (e.g., username and password). We did see that with our WordPress instance; its configuration contained a set up username and password to access the MariaDB database.