Wiley Beginning Visual Basic 2005 Databases 978-0-7645-8894-5 Manuale Utente

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Databases

Most Visual Basic 2005 applications that you write use data in some form or fashion. Where you
retrieve that data from depends on what your application is doing. One of the most common types
of applications that you are likely to write is a database application, which retrieves and processes
data from a database.

Although there are different kinds of databases and different manufacturers, the databases that
you are most likely to encounter are Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle. This
chapter explores the components that make up each of these common databases at a high level to
help you gain a better understanding of how they work.

To help you understand how databases are put together, you look also at relational database
design. This topic describes the relationships between the different tables in your database and
how they can be designed for optimal performance.

At the end of the chapter, you build the sample databases that are used throughout the rest of this
book. You’ll be using these databases to perform the Try It Out exercises in each of the chapters.

In this chapter, you:

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Learn which components make up a Microsoft Access database

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Learn which components make up a Microsoft SQL Server database

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Learn which components make up an Oracle database

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Learn about relational database design

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Build the sample databases used throughout the rest of this book

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