Data Modeling

The core of any application is its data. At the very root of any computer application, it's a system designed to deal with information, receiving it, transforming it, and returning either the same information or insightful elements extracted from it. The stored data is a crucial part of this cycle, as it allows you to use information that has been communicated before.

In this chapter, we will talk about how we can model the stored data from our application and what the different options are to store and structure the data to be persisted.

We will start by describing the different database options that are available, which are critical to understanding their different applications, but we will mostly focus, during the chapter, on relational databases, as they are the most common type. We will describe the concept of a transaction to ensure that different changes are applied in one go.

We will describe different ways that we can increase the scope of a...