Engineer Explains: Database in 5 minutes
![](https://shiftmag.dev/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weihu.png?x73249)
![](https://shiftmag.dev/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weihu.png?x73249)
Can you even be a software engineer if you don’t understand databases?
You can create a simple script or even an application without a database, but the reality is that databases enable data storage, retrieval, and analyses crucial for modern software applications.
Wei Hu from Oracle, the company that brought the first commercial relational database to market in 1979, says that the right way to choose how your app will store data is to think about what happens if it becomes very successful and you have to scale it.
In this video, Hu explains the three approaches to organizing and storing data and how to choose the one that is right for you:
This video is a part of ShiftMag’s video series, Engineer Explains.
We asked experienced engineers to share how they would explain some basic and some less basic tech terminology to different job tech job titles or at three levels of experience – from junior developer to CTO.
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How would you explain APIs, internal developer platforms, software architecture, software testing, scaling infrastructure without breaking the bank, low-code as a dev tool, or full-stack framework at three levels of experience?