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What is a Database?
A database is a collection of data that is organized so that its contents can easily be accessed, managed, and updated. The most prevalent type of database is the relational database, a tabular database in which data is defined so that it can be reorganized and accessed in a number of different ways. A distributed database is one that can be dispersed or replicated among different points in a network.Databases contain aggregations of data records or files, such as sales transactions, product catalogs and inventories, and customer profiles. Typically, a database manager provides users the capabilities of controlling read/write access, specifying report generation, and analyzing usage. Structured Query Language is a standard language for making interactive queries from and updating a database such as IBM's DB2, Microsoft's Access, and database products from Oracle, Sybase, and Computer Associates.
And now in English - What is a Database?
It's a usually large collection of related data organized especially for rapid search and retrieval (nowadays almost invariably electronic). A simple database might be a single file containing many records, each of which contains the same set of fields where each field is a certain fixed width.Sometimes for the non-computer literate, it's easier to think of a database as a file cabinet. Each cabinet drawer contains several files. And each file may contain an employee record for a different employee. In a database, each employee record is also referred to as a record. The individual pieces of information are data and may be input into fields. For example a person's name may be put in two (2) fields - LastName and FirstName. We may decide that there is a group of fields of related information for all employees. Therefore, in a database, we group these fields into a Table. Thus we begin the transformation of our file cabinet into a database.
We hope this helps in your understanding of Databases. Please check out our Additional Resources for more study and information on this topic.
To try out a Sample Database, please view and try out our sample input and output pages.
