How do Relational Databases Work Under the Hood?

Posted by Pierreten on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Pierreten
Published on 2010-05-21T23:01:09Z Indexed on 2010/05/21 23:10 UTC
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Filed under:

sql

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databases

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under-the-hood

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parsing

I've always been interested in how you can throw some SQL at at database, and it nearly instantaneously returns your results in an orderly manner without thinking about it as anything other than a black box.

What is really going on?

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with how values are laid out regularly in memory, similar to an array; but aside from that, I don't know much else.

How is SQL parsed in a manner to facilitate all of this?

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