Glossary
Database Administrator Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential database administrator terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key database administrator vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in database administrator training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Backup
- A copy of data for recovery.
- Database
- An organized collection of data.
- Deadlock
- When two transactions block each other.
- High availability
- Designs that keep databases running through failures.
- Index
- A structure that speeds up queries.
- Least privilege
- Giving users only the access they need.
- Normalization
- Organizing data to reduce duplication.
- Query plan
- How the database executes a query.
- Replication
- Copying data to another server.
- Restore
- Recovering data from a backup.
- RPO
- Recovery point objective: how much data loss is acceptable.
- RTO
- Recovery time objective: how fast systems must be restored.
- Schema
- The structure of a database.
- SQL
- Structured Query Language.
- Transaction
- A unit of work that succeeds or fails completely.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Database Administrator practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Database Administrator training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.