All I know is that it’s a “database management system”, and I don’t even know what that means! I have tried fooling around with Access and have gotten nowhere. Where do I start and what is the purpose of this?
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It occurs to me that a lot of us have answered what it is – but very few of us answered the “what is the purpose of this” part of your question.
The answer to that is that a database gives you the ability to explore data and its connections, but to a modern mindset, which is used to using google, that may not mean much. To understand exactly what it means, we really have to look at how hard related information was to find before databases, and get a feel for how vastly they’ve changed things. This is going to be best highlighted by looking at a set of tasks that databases have made relatively easy and painless, and discussing what those looked like before computerized databases were widespread – I’m going to use finding out about people and places as my example
So… let’s talk about all the information you might have, when you want to research someone or someplace. I’m only going to toss us back to the year 2000 here – but remember that things get harder the further back you go. Anyways, you might know any one piece of the following: An address, a name, or a phone number. How do you find out the other two, or any additional information?
The answer was that you needed a distinct tool, depending on the information you had. If you knew a phone number, you needed the phone registry for that area code, which was sorted by number, and would give you the name of the owner (and maybe the address). If you knew the name, you needed the phone book for that geographic location, which would give you the phone number (and maybe the street address). If you knew the street address, you would need to look at the street directory, which was likely to tell you the name (and might have a phone number).
Three distinct and cumbersome tools, to find out the same pieces of information, depending upon which one you had. If your information was incomplete (say you didn’t know the full name of the person you were looking for, or knew a nickname… ) you might not even be able to use the piece of information you did know to find the person/place. If you wanted additional pieces for information that were related (like say when someone bought their house, and/or how much it last sold for), you needed to look at yet more pieces of information.
Getting a house’s estimated price (something we can do in minutes on Zillow now), meant cross referencing a street directory with tax bills, then doing a title search at the hall of records to see the last time the deed had changed hands – and you might get 40 year old data that wasn’t useful.
A database lets all of that be tied together… and allows you to freely resort the information, either to answer specific questions (how most of us are used to using them), OR to just look at the assembled data in a new and interesting way. That second one is massive – prior to widespread functional databases, for an analyst who was looking at data, the ability to try out new ways of looking for insights was arduous at best – physically resorting all the information to match your new paradigm, on the off chance something valuable might be gleaned.
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