When building a crud operation, which HTTP methods match up to CRUD Methods? And what are CRUD operations? Simply put, A CRUD operation is a database term that describes the implementation of basic database operations.

What are CRUD operations?

CRUD stands for Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete.
This post is an informative and factual blog post about CRUD operations in databases. This will help people understand the process when they’re looking to create a new table in their database or change an existing one.

It’s also good background information to help them understand why a particular data model works the way it does as well as what would happen if they didn’t perform these steps correctly.

Models in any database can be classified into 3 categories:

1. Simple Models

Simple models are only based on a one-to-many relationship where each row has a single column with many records. They’re also called “relational” models and it’s generally easier to create, maintain and test these models since all the relations are self-explanatory.

2. Advanced Models

Advanced models are usually based on a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship. In these models, each row has a single primary key. They are also called “non relational” or “distributed” models and it’s generally more difficult to create and maintain these models since all the relations are not self-explanatory.

3. Hybrid Models

Hybrid models is a combination of both the basic and advanced models and it’s very common in today’s databases where data is collected from many different sources and user preferences may vary from user to user. 

All these things can be done to a row of data in a database depending on the needs and requirements of the particular table in which they’re stored and data is stored in it (such as types of data, who is storing it, etc.).

Why CRUD?

The reason CRUD operations are important is because they’re the building blocks of any database. The data contained within these records is what fuels your application’s functionality. Without them, databases wouldn’t be able to function without CRUD operations.

Defining CRUD Operations
As mentioned above, the four basic CRUD operations are: Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete. 

1. Create — Adding new rows to a table
2. Retrieve — Getting a single row from the table
3. Update — Updating or changing the value of a single column in an existing row
4. Delete — Removing records from the table
   

It’s important to note that all these operations can be performed on different tables of a database and sometimes it’s necessary to perform multiple operations on the same table on different occasions. For example, for a blog, you may want to create entries in your table for posts and also have some predefined columns that store information about the post, like title, author and content type (text or image).

They’re used to manipulate data in a database table. All databases require these four basic operations to be performed when creating or updating any of the tables in which data will reside. 

It’s important to note that you must understand your requirements before designing your tables and designing the correct table structure can save you time and money when designing databases. Too many people make mistakes in the way they create their tables and it could take days or even weeks of rework (depending on how bad the mistake was) to get it back into a functional state.

Which HTTP methods match up to which CRUD methods?

GET – Retrieve

Retrieve Single row from database –  GET / Retrieves rows based on the criteria specified by URL parameters or by searching in a database. The page will contain all rows matching those criteria (or no rows at all) based on the value of the specified search query within URL parameters

PUT/POST – Update

Create Creates a new row to the database. This can be done by creating an empty record, adding a single row or creating and populating multiple rows, based on query criteria specified by URL parameters or by searching in the database.

DELETE – Delete

Delete Deletes rows from the table

Benefits of CRUD

The benefits of using the CRUD process are:

1. It ensures that all tables have a proper structure and that all columns have the expected data types.
2. It helps with data integrity because it keeps track of what’s supposed to go in each column and who has access to perform any changes to the table (i.e., what people can and can’t do).
3. It allows you to assign different levels of permissions for each individual column and this way only certain people will be able to see or update specific columns or rows and not others, depending on the needs of your company or application.
4. They’re very easily understood when it comes to reading and writing/updating data. This is important for training new employees or new developers working on maintaining your application or database.
5. It saves time, effort and money when training employees or developers because they usually understand how the tables are supposed to be structured since you’ve created the structure for them before hand.
6. They allow you to see which user is creating, updating of deleting what data (this can be very important for payroll purposes).

CRUD and REST are essential when it comes to building scalable software. REST gives you a way to structure your application so that you can use CRUD on every one of your server resources (like a database table or an image stored in the cloud).

REST also lives within the HTTP protocol, which is universally supported and understood by almost every programming language and platform. This makes it easy to build applications that run on various devices and platforms.

Read more about Why we need APIs here.