What are CRUD Operations?

CRUD is a quick way of describing the basic functions of a database.

If you're new to web development, or any programming for that matter, you'll come across the term CRUD. It's a concept that is often mentioned throughout coding bootcamps and online resources like this one. But what is it?

CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update and Delete. These are the four basic functions of persistent storage. When it comes to databases, the concepts used to describe these operations are insert, select, update and delete.

These four operations often form the basis of most web application architectures. The full acronym is commonly referred to as CRUD: Create, Read (or retrieve), Update and Delete.

 

Create

Create is the process of adding new data to a table. When creating new data, it’s important to ensure that the necessary fields are completed and filled with accurate information (or, if it is intentionally left blank, that this is something you need to do). The data should also be complete: all of the fields required to create the data should be filled in.

Read

Read operations are the most commonly used operation in a database. Read operations allow you to retrieve data from a database and is performed through a select statement. Data that is returned can be based on certain criteria defined in the select statement, for example, where you only want to return books written by J.K Rowling.

Update

Update:

The update operation changes the information stored in a database. With this operation, you can change the value of a single field or multiple fields.

In update operations, data validation is very important to ensure that your database doesn't accept any invalid data.

Delete

The final CRUD operation is delete. This one is pretty straightforward: delete removes a record from the database entirely. As you can imagine, this might have some unintended consequences—if your app allows users to create records and then delete them, they may make a mistake when deleting that they can't take back. To avoid this kind of thing, it's common practice to mark records as