Database Design
Designing a database is something that makes you sound like a badass, but it's actually pretty easy to pick up. It can get very complicated very quickly if you want it to, but you can basically hang out in the chill zone forever if you want to.
Relational Databses
We'll be working with relational databases in this tutorial -- specifically, SQL Databases (SQL stands for Structured Query Language).
Tables
A Relational Database stores information in tables.
For example, let's say for our Instagram clone, we wanted to allow people to make posts. We'd make a Post table. Each row would represent a specific instance of a post and each column would represent a characteristic of that post. For example:
Post
| imageURL | caption | postedBy | date | id |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| http://image_url1 | what an amazing day | armanh | mm/dd/yyyy | 1 |
| http://image_url2 | I love cats | rnvarma | mm/dd/yyyy | 2 |
| http://image_url3 | Vegan Life is dope! | anonymous_butterfly | mm/dd/yyyy | 3 |
Then, let's say we wanted to allow people to like the posts. This becomes a bit more complex.
We need to keep track of a couple of things:
- Who likes the post
- simple! We do it the same way we kept track of the
posted_byin the Post Table.
- simple! We do it the same way we kept track of the
- What post are we liking?
- How do we keep track of this? Something called a Foreign Key
Basically, this is what the table would look like:
Like
| likedBy | Post |
|---|---|
| user1 | 2 |
| user2 | 1 |
| user3 | 1 |
| user4 | 1 |