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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Microsoft Access is a relational database management system (RDBMS).
That’s essentially fancy words for “a big fat Excel workbook, with very strict rules on what you can put where”.
In an Excel spreadsheet, you can put any data you want in any cell you want. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s part of a table or not, just click a cell and type something in there. You can make “”real”” tables with headers and fancy sorting and filtering if you really want to, but it’s optional.
In a RDBMS, tables are the only thing you get. You can’t just pick a cell and chuck data into it, you have to make the table with headers first, and then you’re allowed to add rows to the tables you make. And inside those rows, you’re not allowed to put just whatever you want in any column. You specify ahead of time when you make the table what each column is allowed to have in it. Like, “The `total` column is only allowed to have numbers in it,” or, “The `date` column is only allowed to have a properly formatted date in it”, etc. Try to put in a kind of data it’s not expecting and the database will throw an error and tell you to go kick rocks.
It’s a lot more restrictive than Excel. That’s on purpose. By restricting what you’re allowed to do, the database can make a whole load of assumptions about your data. Where it is, what kind of data it will be, whether there will be duplicates or not, all kinds of things. Those assumptions add up to a lot of saved time, meaning databases can be *extremely* fast at looking things up. *Way* faster than Excel.
Some systems (including Access) include an Excel-like interface so you can see and interact with the data kind of like you would in Excel. But you can do a lot more complicated stuff by talking to the database directly. To do that, you have to speak its language, which is called “Structured Query Language”, or “SQL” for short. Using SQL, you can ask the database very complex questions. And since it is so well-optimized, it can do them very quickly.
You generally only want a database like MS Access in two situations. First is that you have a *LOT* of data, so it matters that it’s very fast. Second is when you intend to hook the database up to another piece of software or a website using programming, in which case the ability to ask for things in SQL will make the programming way simpler. If it’s just you, a human, looking at and editing data manually, you probably just want Excel or some Excel-like program, such as Google Sheets.
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