Databases: how they work, and a brief history
Let’s start at the very most basic thing, the words we’re using: a “database” literally just means “a structured collection of data”. Almost anything meets this definition – an object in memory, an XML file, a list in HTML. It’s super broad, so we call some radically different things “databases”.
The thing people use all the time is, formally, a Database Management System, abbreviated to DBMS. This is a piece of software that handles access to the pile of data. Technically one DBMS can manage multiple databases (MySQL and postgres both do this) but often a DBMS will have just one database in it.
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