The words you will encounter.
- TABLE: a collection of rows of one kind
- ROW or RECORD: one item
- COLUMN or FIELD: one piece of information within a row
- PRIMARY KEY: the column uniquely identifying each row
- INDEX: a structure making lookups fast
- QUERY: an instruction sent to the database
SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE: read, add, change, remove
- JOIN: combining rows from two tables
- SCHEMA: the structure of tables and columns
- DUMP: an export as SQL statements
- PREFIX: the string before database and user names, or before table names
- COLLATION: the rules for comparing and sorting text
- CHARACTER SET: how text is encoded
- SERIALISED DATA: a structure stored as text, with recorded lengths
- TRANSIENT: a temporary cached value with an expiry
- AUTOLOAD: options loaded on every request, in WordPress
- NORMALISATION: organising data to avoid duplication
- FOREIGN KEY: a column referencing another table's primary key
- TRANSACTION: a group of changes applied together or not at all
WHICH MATTER MOST
Prefix, dump, index and serialised data. Those four account for most practical database problems.
