Background information

Tables are widely used to succintly represent large amounts of infornation. The information can be in different forms depending on the nature of the project. Often, the tables are composed of many columns each one containing a record pertaining to a certain feature of the object(s) of interest. In a world as complex as this one, chances are, a single table will not be enough to summarize all the information that you need/have while you make your earthshattering contribution. Furthermore these tables will be linked to each other in different ways. How do we handle all ths information? How do we create new tables from existing ones so that we can use the correct datapoints for the data analysis we are about to do? The answer is (you guessed it!) databases…

A database is simply a collection of a bunch of data tables (think excel tables) that are somehow linked to each other. Here is an example: Let’s say you have a table that shows students and the classes that yhet are taking. Then another table that shows classes and number of credits that each class has. It turns out you can use these two tables and come up with a third table that tells you how many credits each student is taking.

Excited? Read on…

Reading / Tech

In order to be able to do these things you need to have a set of tools installed in your computer. Here are some of the tutorials you should check out.