The underlying mathematics, don't worry about the underlying mathematics.
Just be aware as you're reading,
don't be surprised when people lapse into this more fancy nomenclature.
So the idea is that you model data at a connection point rather than like,
here's data and we're starting here and we're reading through it.
The idea is if you model everything as a connection, like who a person is.
A person is a connection between this, that, and the other thing.
And so this notion of modeling stuff at a connection
is the underlying math that makes databases fast, but
when we programmers think about it we kind of think about it as rows and columns.
And so here's just a screenshot of a spreadsheet that I made.
Along the bottom you see the names of the various subsheets,
tracks, albums, artists, genres, and titles.
And those are like the database tables.
And then each table, if you select it, has a row and a column.
So it's got these columns.
This has three columns in it and it has a bunch of rows.
The other thing, when you're doing stuff in a spreadsheet.
You just kind of come up with a data model, a schema, a strategy so
that you know that the first column is always the title, the second column is
the rating, because if you didn't label it, it would make no sense.
So we often do something where the first row of a spreadsheet
is kind of metadata about the columns, right?
Now, the spreadsheet doesn't exactly know that you're doing it.
Even though some of the things you do, like sometimes it sorts and says, oh,
check this tickbox to say the first row is title, so don't sort it.
So when you sort stuff you only sort like the bottom part of it, right?
And so it sort of knows it's the title.
But in a database this becomes what we call the schema.