Databases and their real world use examples - eviltoast

I am very curious as to how databases are used in the real world, whether you’re using MySQL and what not, how does it all come together in a real world business? Banking and gaming I know, but is it something that gets stored on data centres and then put into a VM?

I might be overcomplexing this but I understand the good use cases with VMs and containers etc just not with databases.

I’d google, but I’d like a ELI5 due to my smooth brain with these concepts, thank you.

  • DontTakeMySky@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    The Lemmy app we are using on our phones needs to download content from Lemmy so it can be displayed to us. Lemmy might just have one big file full of links, but that’s annoying to have to write code to handle. Or it might have a folder full of files where each file is a post, but that’s also a bit annoying to write code to manage.

    It (probably) uses a local SQLite database to store all of the cached posts.

    Conceptually, a database is just a place to store things, just like a big text file. The database just handles a lot of the grunt work for you and makes it easier to search, organize, and filter the data.

    So anywhere there is data, there could be a database.