A2 Project ICT 4

Databases are being used throughout society and impact on your daily lives. During this unit, you will consider how databases are created and how they are used.

What is a database?

Databases are ubiquitous in computing and underpin many computer systems. From financial services to internet searching, databases are what make systems and businesses work. Without databases there would be no online banking, no Google, and no online learning.

A collection of organised data

A database is a collection of organised data that can be efficiently stored, sorted, and searched.

How the data is organised will often determine the type of database used. There are many different types of database; some examples of the different types are relational, object-orientated, NoSQL, and distributed.

This unit will be concentrating on relational databases, as they most commonly used in industry and education, although many of the concepts are shared with the other types of database. Here is a summary of database types.

Data in relational databases is organised into related tables. Each table will hold records, and within each record will be fields.

• Why use a database?
• Advantages of Databases