Last week, I was sitting in my apartment talking to my roommates about future jobs and why our friends who graduated last year all migrated north to San Francisco. We brought up one of our friends, Danny, who recently got a job with Google. We were looking through some questions Google asks in their interviews, and one was: “How would you explain a database in three sentences to your eight year old nephew?” An answer we found online and really enjoyed was:
“A database is a machine that remembers lots of information about lots of things. People use them to help remember that information. Go play outside.”
The point of this question is to see if the applicant can take a complex idea and translate it in a simple, dumbed-down language. While reading through “Databases,” by Stephen Ramsay, I realized it might actually take a lot more than three sentences to accurately portray the importance of databases. Ramsay defines the purpose of databases “to store information about a particular domain,” and having the capability for one to “ask questions about the state of the domain.” The Relational Model, Ramsay notes, finds a relationship between individual data points, opposed to just storing these sets of data. Under the header ‘database design,’ Ramsay uses American novels as his the subject for his fictitious database. With the use of primary and foreign keys, links are formed between the various data points, which point the user toward the desirable output.
I was scrolling through my iTunes this morning and noticed how it acted as a database for all my music, and how it could be categorized in various ways: song title, artist, genre, etc. Shortly after, I headed over to Trader Joes to pick up some groceries and realized as they scanned every item, the price is being looked up in a database that’s based on the Universal Product Code. The UPC refers to the usage of barcodes that stores use in order to track items in the store. I learned every time I make a phone call, the caller ID information has to be retrieved from some sort of database. Even most of our cars have a little database inside that makes the light come on when it’s time to ‘Check Engine.’ These databases make our society function, and it’s hard to imagine how everyday life would run without their assistance.
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