Hello, I am Ryan, Chief Marketing Officer for Rodapa. I am a Mechanical Engineering Graduate from Loyola Marymount University. You may ask: Why is a Mechanical Engineering graduate doing marketing work for a new business? The primary reason is because I want to be a well-rounded person in as many different aspects as possible. Being the Chief Marketing Officer allows me to experience and learn about a spectrum of information that I have not ever experienced, and present vast new challenges to overcome. I am also working on other things behind the scenes that is not public (yet). 

I have needed to start learning on my own about a whole new subject since I have started at Rodapa: Databases. One of Rodapa’s primary focuses is on accessing and using information from databases to help businesses, so it is essential that I start learning about how they can be a crucial asset in all ways for businesses. I have started a course on www.edx.org called “Databases: Relational Databases and SQL” posted by StanfordOnline. It seems to be a great free (if you do not want certification) class that helps give a lot of information. 

Since I am taking this course, I figure that it would be great to summarize the information that I am learning for you, the reader, to learn a bit about. Since it is fresh in my head, I figure it is a great way to summarize that information on our blog so that it can help you decide on using them for yourself. Always feel free to reach out to us if you need any help deciding on how you can use databases for yourself and your business. 

Since this is the introduction to the series, I think that it is important to note a few terms that are crucial to understanding databases and what I will be talking about in the future:

• Database- A set of named relations (or simply put, tables).
  • Each relation has a pre defined named attributes (or columns).
  • Each Tuple (or row) has a value for each attribute.
  • Each attribute has a type (or domain, a string of characters, integers, etc.)
• Schema- A description of different relations in a Database.
• Instance- Contents that are present at a given point in time. 
• Null- A special value for unknown or not defined.
• Key- An attribute whose value is unique in each row (or topple) or a set of attributes in which the the combined values are distinctive. 

I hope you enjoy and learn more about databases as I continue this series. I plan to post new entires weekly on Fridays. I wish you the best of luck on what ever endeavors you’re currently undertaking!