Relational vs. Non-relational Databases

Learn about the differences between relational and non-relational databases.

The way information is modeled and manipulated has been changing for many years. One reason for that change comes from the need for the persistent availability of information. Nonetheless, achieving this in modern applications is not an easy task. The most common way to do so used to be scaling machines by adding more resources such as memory or CPU. However, this strategy impacted costs as companies had to buy hardware very often. This and many other related problems paved the way to NoSQL, a new approach to modeling and interacting with information.

SQL to NoSQL

Relational databases

Relational databases (also called SQL databases) are databases that store information in tables that can share that information with each other. A relational database may have tables such as customers, payments, orders and many more. Every table has columns and rows where a column is an attribute of an entity and a row is a record, as the image below shows:

Database relationship

When implementing relationships, there are two important columns—primary and foreign keys. ...

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