A Relational Database Primer

Abstract

For most social scientists, data come m a rectangular form similar to a spreadsheet, where columns represent variables and rows are observations. For a few years now, however, a more complex view of data has been evolving in the fields of computer science and management information systems. The purposes of this paper are to introduce this relational view of data to social scientists and to argue that this way of looking at data can be much more powerful than the traditional view. The first part of the paper introduces the terminology and concepts of the relational model. This is followed by a discussion of relational operators, normalization, and the entity-relationship diagram—a technique used to visualize a relational database. The paper then illustrates these concepts with crime and justice data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Keywords: database, data management, relational database.