Working with a database

Let's now see how you would access a database, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle, or more. (We will be needing this in Chapter 4, Implementing RESTful Services with Node, when we get to build a set of services.) Accessing a database is frequently done, so that's what we will be doing. I chose some geographical data (with countries, their regions, and the cities in those), to which we'll later add something else, to work with more complex examples.

Getting ready

Getting a list of countries was easy: I used the data from https://github.com/datasets/country-codes, which I pruned down to just the country two-character code (as in the ISO 3166-1 norm) and name. For regions and cities...