What does a databse do?

Answer 1

database is a structured collection of records or data that is stored in a computer system. A database usually contains software so that a person or program can use it to answer queries or extract desired information.[1] The term "database" refers to the collection of related records, and the software should be referred to as the database management system (DBMS). Other terms for DBMS are database manager or database system. When the context is ambiguous, however, many database administrators and programmers use the term "database" to refer to both the data collection and the software that enables it to be accessed. Typically, for a given database, there is a structural description of the type of facts held in that database: this description is known as a schema. The schema describes the objects that are represented in the database, and the relationships among them. There are a number of different ways of organizing a schema, that is, of modeling the database structure: these are known as database models (or data models). The model in most common use today is the relational model. Other models such as the hierarchical model and the network model use a more explicit representation of relationships (see below for explanation of the various database models). Database management systems are usually categorized according to the database model that they support. The data model tends to determine the query languages that are available to access the database. A great deal of the internal engineering of a DBMS, however, is independent of the data model, and is concerned with managing factors such as performance, concurrency, integrity, and recovery from hardware failures. In these areas there are large differences between products.