A database is a great big electronic filing cabinet where you can store your data. But the really useful thing about a database is that it allows you to do so much with the data once it's stored there.

You can sort it, report on it, link it to other data and filter it (maybe you'd like to see all your clients who've spent more than £5,000 on widgets in the last 3 months).

Your database might contain client information, or stock & invoicing data. There might be a database to store product information. In fact, in the real world a database might easily contain all of these and more, providing a central system around which the business operates.

Databases often live on servers, where they can be accessed by the whole team.

They may even sit behind a website, so that they can be accessed from anywhere in the world.