Relational vs. Non-Relational Databases
The big difference between relational and non-relational databases is that non-relational databases nest their data. Instead of keeping records on separate tables, they store records within other records.
To over-simplify it, you can think of non-relational databases as giant JSON blobs. If a user can have multiple courses, you might just add all the courses to the user record.
{
"users": [
{
"id": 0,
"name": "Elon",
"courses": [
{
"name": "Biology",
"id": 0
},
{
"name": "Biology",
"id": 0
}
]
}
]
}
This often results in duplicate data within the database. That's obviously less than ideal, but it does have some benefits that we'll talk about later in the course.
Relational Database
Non-Relational Database
____ databases often duplicate data, while ____ databases typically don't.