Introduction

This is meant to give folks who work with database every day a little grounding in what happens underneath. I am a Ruby/Rails dev so the examples that aren’t SQL will be in Ruby.

This is a big topic. I’m gonna try and lay this out in a simple way

1. The theory that lies behind relational databases
2. How that theory got turned into SQL.
3. How queries are built
4. How data is stored.
5. Other architectures
6. Common pitfalls

This is quite a large undertaking, but I’m hope to do my best to make it easier for people to follow. by breaking it down into small enough pieces to be digestible.

This theory and its consequences doesn’t seem to be taught any more, or at least not well.