In general, a database acts as the primary location for keeping your web application data accessible from frontend interfaces or any third-party systems. Planning and designing the database should be one of the highest priority tasks in the initial stages of a project.

As developers, we have the chance to design the database from scratch in many web applications. WordPress comes with a prestructured database and hence the task of planning the table structure and adapting to existing tables becomes much more complex than everyone thinks. Throughout this chapter, we are going to focus on the basics of planning and accessing the database for web applications. This chapter is important for the rest of the book and may seem more theoretical compared to other chapters.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics: