Gregor Purdy - Database Terminology

This is a collection of terms and acronyms you may encounter when working with database technology.

ACID

Despite a commonly held belief among the uninitiated, this is not the substance of choice of data modelers.

A mnemonic for the four important properties of database transactions: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability.

The source of this acronym is the 1983-12 paper "Principles of Transaction-Oriented Database Recovery," by Theo Härder and Andreas Reuter, published in ACM Comp. Surv. 15, No. 4.

BLOB

Binary Large OBject.

CRUD

This is not a slang term for data, nor even for dirty data.

A mnemonic for the four operations on a database object: Create, Read, Update, and Delete.

DDL

Data Definition Language.

E/R

Entity/Relationship.

FD

Functional Dependence.

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: 2005-12-04 21:14:52 -0800 (Sun, 04 Dec 2005) $