What is a database?

Most people in this day and age have no doubt heard of the term “database”. But unless you are a programmer, power-user, or have researched the subject matter because you needed one, then you might not be fully aware of what exactly a database is.

A database is made up of tables of records. A database can have one or more tables. A table can have zero or more records. And a record can have one or more fields.

An analogy of a database is a spreadsheet (with much stricter rules), where each sheet can be thought of as a table and each row in the sheet is a record. A table therefore can be described as rows and columns where the columns are fields in the record.

Most databases are relational. This means that tables reference other tables. A table should contain only records of a distinct object, then where you have tables that contain multiple objects, you want those fields to reference records from the distinct object tables.

It will become clearer when we delve into more specific examples.