Hey, good day everyone and welcome to this course on database design and management. My name is Dr. Soper and it's my great privilege and high honor to be your instructor for this course. We're going to begin in this first video with topic number one, which will be getting started with databases. And as we'll see this topic is broken into several different videos. The overall goal of which is to provide you with some foundational information about database technology in general, so that we can have a solid point of embarkation for the rest of our journey through this class on database design and management. Alright, let's get started with part one for topic one in our database class. And in this video, we will focus on the purpose of a database. Let's begin by discussing the purpose of a database. Now naturally, people understand, even if you've never had any experience with databases before. It's a sufficiently common term now that said we know that purpose of databases is in part to store data. However, it doesn't end with the storage of data. So we're not going to treat a database just like a big bucket where we can dump all of our data. It's much more than that. In addition to the data themselves, and you'll note that data is a plural term. So I will treat it as a plural. I mean, you try to use correct grammar as we work our way through this content with semester. In addition to the data themselves, a database provides for us or for the organization that's using it a way of organizing the data. So we can impose an organizational structure on our data and that can be very useful. This ensures that so we can keep track of everything that we need to keep track of. And find what we want when we need to find it. We can quickly locate whatever we need. And we can do so in a way that is maximally efficient from the perspective of computational resources, both storage space and let's say a CPU time. So this comes along with the database as well. It's not just the data, but it's also the organizational structure. And additionally, all modern enterprise level database systems provide us with these additional minimally with these additional capabilities. That is, if they give us a platform that we or our various apps can use to query the database, create new data, modify existing data and delete existing data. So querying will be a major part of our class. And for now, we need to understand that the main idea with querying is we're asking the database questions. And we have this built in mechanism in database technology that allows us to ask questions of the database and have the database give us the answers to those questions with no further effort on our part. So we can say things like a database. What were the average sales for my stores in California today or a hay database, who was my best salesperson last month or hay database. What's the maximum salary that I pay to employees in my marketing department, almost any sort of question that you can possibly imagine the database can answer for us automatically. As long as we know how to ask those questions and assuming that the requisite data that would be necessary to answer the question are actually available in the database. So this is an extraordinarily powerful, useful element of the broader enterprise level database management systems and is one of the various obvious reasons why databases have become so broadly adopted by organizations, small, medium or large doesn't matter. Beyond this, beyond these motivating purpose of a database, another great thing about these databases is that they can store information in a way that maps directly to what we see in the real world. And this extends beyond what we can do with a simplest in the real world and the business world and in your daily lives. The information that we have, the data that we have are very commonly related to each other in some kind of hierarchical way. So there's some sort of hierarchy that we have and it occurs very commonly in the natural world and certainly in the business world as well. Some examples of these types of hierarchical relationships are things like a department can have many different employees. And it's a hierarchical relationship, we can have many employees that work in one department and then within our company we might have several different departments. You may have some sort of managerial hierarchy like these people, these employees work for a particular manager, you may say things like we sell many products. A customer can place many orders and order can contain many different products. A product can be provided to us by many different suppliers. So we have these hierarchies, it's very common in the business world and it's common in our daily lives as well. And one of the great things about relational databases is that they can store information according to the natural hierarchical structure of these relationships. So this naturally is a great advantage beyond what is possible if we're trying to store information on the form of a simple list. This is a major advantage of relational databases is that they allow us to create a data model to design a solution to a data problem that maps directly to the hierarchical relationships that actually exist in those data out in the real world. So it's pretty cool, we're going to learn a lot about this as we traverse these topics.