Web is a huge repository of resources, in form of text, media and resources which can help you earn money, solve various problems and at times even save lives. Web development is a highly dynamic field with an every growing demand of efficiency speed and rich user experience and yet, uncluttered. Simplicity is more than a buzzword but an actual strain which almost all developers around the world have to deal with. There are many things to take care of. Efficiency, customization, ease of use and a lot and lot of technical aspects to just begin with. There are people who actually take the pain to write every single line of code themselves, just to make sure that the power offered by the programming languages can be completely exploited. Although is is not bad in anyway, but it becomes tedious and difficult to manage as the application code base grows. It is this time when many of those who took the pain of writing things from scratch feel as if they have committed a mistake by doing things manually. The feeling of being in the middle of something unfinished and yet too far from the beginning can get frustrating. Hence, frameworks were born. Since, PHP is one of most used (or perhaps THE most used) language for programming web applications, we will be focusing on PHP. Moreover, QCubed is a PHP framework, so that would make more sense (in our opinion).
Who am I and why you can trust this documentation? Yes - you would ask yourself that question before and as you want to read this article and any that follow in this series. So here I tell you: My name is Vaibhav Kaushal and I am one of the core contributors to the QCubed project: http://trac.qcu.be/projects/qcubed/wiki/QcubedContributors . I also add to the QCubed wiki from time to time and usually you will find here on this site all that you will find there. There are however some pieces which you would not find here but I would give a link to those pages anyway. In case you are thinking about why a documentation on this site when it could have been all on the main project site itself, here are my selfish reasons:
- I love to write.
- When I bring out a new feature, I would write it here.
- Other members are busy enough that they usually do not write any documentation (not that I am all free, but writing being something I enjoy, I write it)
- This is a documentation (a blog, organized in an order) while the main site contains mostly a wiki where things are available.
- I usually update things on this site first and then do that on the project wiki - the reason being - I usually fail to find the right article within the limited time I get and then update it.
- I can have revisions of documents here which is a little difficult (and cumbersome) for me to create there.
- This site displays some ads which gives me a few pennies to keep writing code which I can contribute back
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Web applications, just like any other type of application grow and when they grow fast, you will find yourself in need of more than one database before you will know it yourself! There are multiple reasons for that. You might be needing to separate your products database from the one where you do your financial transactions. You might be having another one for a customer care front end and what not! Now, there is a huge possibility that the types of database you use will vary. For example, let us say you created your basic web application in MySQL but now, you want a more robust one for financial transactions and you want to go for PostgreSQL or may be Microsoft SQL Server!With QCubed, you will not face a problem! The good thing about RDBMS systems is SQL. In most of the cases, the SQL for all the databases will remain same and hence, the QCubed's querying mechanism (it's called QQuery) will take care of that! 
There are multiple ways in which QCubed helps you get along with the database of your choice! This section covers the 'M' or the Model part of the QCubed Documentation and tells you about how QCubed helps you to get going with your databases. Here are the features in brief: