What Items would you be most likely to keep a database?

Answer 1

The most likely type of data you will store in a database is text data. Suppliers, customers, employees, product descriptions and so on are all largely composed of text. Although a good proportion of any database will also be composed of numeric data, that data still has to be associated with something a bit more tangible. For instance, a product's selling price would be useless if we didn't know which product it related to, which means you need a text description. There might also be an image associated with the product, but that image will typically be stored outside of the database itself, only the path or URL to the image resource will be stored and even that is composed entirely of text.

You probably have a media player on your computer and it will maintain a database of all your music. However, the audio is not stored in the database, the database simply keeps track of where each audio file is stored and extracts the meta-data from the file (or downloads it from an online provider), the bulk of which is purely text information (album, artist, track name, composer, etc).

There is no limit to the actual type of record you can store in a database, but no matter what a record physically represents, text data will typically make up the bulk of its data. In some cases you may find binary data embedded in a record, but binary data can be used to represent absolutely anything from a thumbnail image to a video to an entire machine code program. However, in most cases, binary resources will be stored externally to the database (often on a completely separate machine), and a text-based URL will refer to the resource instead. This helps keep the actual database size to a minimum and thus speeds up data retrieval, the bulk of which will be text.