4 ms·

Ok. In that case, they are both tables; but they have different properties.

• btilly 16y ago
  It is an important distinction to make. Relational databases are all about how to structure your data, and then how to manipulate that structure. In particular a key value add is that because the database understands how your data is structured, you can tell it what data you want out, and it can figure out the most efficient way to extract that data. In practice it isn't perfect. There are times that the database does things wrong, and it is useful to have a bag of tricks for figuring out when it is going wrong and forcing it to do the right thing. But on average it does much, much better than most developers could, and does it with a lot less work.