Definition: An organized collection of information.

Overview

A collection of files and records is just raw data. Once it has been organized, rationalized, and formatted so that it can be effectively accessed in a uniform way, enabling general queries to be answered by a simple procedure, it becomes a database.

Rational organization is of course essential for any effective record keeping, but for a database system the demands are far more rigorous. A database system will be expected to be able to answer queries totally automatically. To answer even the simplest of queries, such as “what is the salary of the employee named Q. X. Smith in the advertising department?,” mechanically, without any access to intelligence, requires an established format to the data. A human searcher could simply leaf through all the employee records; they would easily be able to pick out the employee's name and their departmental assignment from each form, because everybody knows what proper names look like. It is just common sense; nobody would ever confuse a department name with a social-security number even if they were written in unexpected places on the form.

Of course, computers don't have common sense, and can't be expected to know what makes a credible name for a human. For any such query to be answerable, every single employee record must be formatted uniformly, so that the query application knows exactly where in each record to find the employee's name, department, and salary.