What if you want to get a list of all your associates in California? Your card file isn’t organized by state, so you have to flip through every card, one by one, to create a list. Such physical databases have major limitations compared with their digital cousins. You can find any person’s card because you know where in the alphabet to look, even though there may be thousands of cards to look through.

Image a business card file (yep, that’s also a database) that organizes information about people alphabetically by name. The purpose of any database is to organize information so you can find what you’re looking for quickly and easily. In fact, if you look up the word “database” in a dictionary (which is a database, too), you’ll find that a database is just a collection of information, or data. But databases have been around much longer than computers-a phone book, a cookbook, and an encyclopedia are all databases. It calls to mind images of software engineering degrees and pocket protectors.

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