Database Management

A database is where you store your application's data. Compared with simple file storage, databases provide structure for data, efficient querying, and can scale to large volumes of data.

These days, databases are easy to set up. However, unless you've got a dedicated administrator, hosting your own database in the long run can be challenging. Tuning performance and scaling out require low-level configuration. But perhaps more importantly, it's quite easy to screw up and lose all of the data.

One solution to these problems is the database-as-a-service, or DBaaS. This works just like software-as-a-service (SaaS). Some third-party team of experts is responsible for keeping the database running. Your app just connects to it remotely, and you pay for what you use, whatever scale you're at.

In the chapter, we will look at some of the best database options available, and then see how to use them in our app.