Visit the Web site of an online catalog vendor similar to RM

Visit the Web site of an online catalog vendor
similar to RMO (such as www.llbean.com or
www.landsend.com) or an online vendor of
computers and related merchandise (such as
www.cdw.com or www.newegg.com). Browse
the online catalog and note the various types of
information contained there. Construct a list
of complex data types that would be needed to
store all the online catalog information.

Solution

The online catalogs vendor generally uses fast performing databases to store the huge amount of data, like MySQL, Postgres. They use indexing of database to retrieve/ fetch data very fast. Indexing is very much similar to hashing of data, i.e key and value way of storing data which gives search time of O(1).

Generally, the data is stored in various tables following the rules of database normalization to avoid data duplication and when required different tables are joined to output required information.