3 Review(s)

The database is now such an integral part of our day-to-day life that often we are not aware that we are using one. To start our discussion of databases, in this section we examine some applications of database systems. For the purposes of this discussion, we consider a database to be a collection of related data and a database management system (DBMS) to be the software that manages and controls access to the database. A database application is simply a program that interacts with the database at some point in its execution. We also use the more inclusive term database system as a collection of application programs that interact with the database along with the DBMS and the database itself. We provide more accurate definitions in Section.