A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality (for example, the availability of rooms in hotels), in a way that supports processes requiring this information (for example, finding a hotel with vacancies). The term "database" refers both to the way its users view it, and to the logical and physical materialization of its data, content, in files, computer memory, and computer data storage. This definition is very general, and is independent of the technology used. However, not every collection of data is a database; the term database implies that the data is managed to some level of quality (measured in terms of accuracy, availability, usability, and resilience) and this in turn often implies the use of a general-purpose Database management system (DBMS). A general-purpose DBMS is typically a complex software system that meets many usage requirements, and the databases that it maintains are often large and complex.

The term database is correctly applied to the data and data structures themself, and is different from the DBMS which is a software system that allows to store and change the database (i.e., the data), as well as retrieve information from it. The structure of a database is generally too complex to be handled without its DBMS, and any attempt to do otherwise is very likely to result in database corruption. DBMSs are packaged as computer software products: well-known products include the Oracle DBMS, Access and SQL Server from Microsoft, DB2 from IBM and the Open source DBMS MySQL. Each such DBMS product currently supports many thousands of databases all over the world. The stored data in a database is not generally portable across different DBMS, but can inter-operate to some degree (while each DBMS type controls a database of its own database type) using standards like SQL and ODBC. A successful general-purpose DBMS is designed in such a way that it can satisfy as many different possible applications and application designers as possible. A DBMS also needs to provide effective run-time execution to properly support (e.g., in terms of performance, availability, and security) as many end-users (the database's application users) as needed. Sometimes the combination of a database and its respective DBMS is referred to as a Database system (DBS).

Analytical database

Analysts may do their work directly against a data warehouse or create a separate analytic database for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). For example, a company might extract sales records for analyzing the effectiveness of advertising and other sales promotions at an aggregate level.

Data warehouse

Data warehouses archive modern data from operational databases and often from external sources such as market research firms. Often operational data undergoes transformation on its way into the warehouse, getting summarized, anonymized, reclassified, etc. The warehouse becomes the central source of data for use by managers and other end-users who may not have access to operational data. For example, sales data might be aggregated to weekly totals and converted from internal product codes to use UPCs so that it can be compared with ACNielsen data. Some basic and essential components of data warehousing include retrieving and analyzing data, transforming,loading and managing data so as to make it available for further use.
Operations in a data warehouse are typically concerned with bulk data manipulation, and as such, it is unusual and inefficient to target individual rows for update, insert or delete. Bulk native loaders for input data and bulk SQL passes for aggregation are the norm.

Distributed database

These are databases of local work-groups and departments at regional offices, branch offices, manufacturing plants and other work sites. These databases can include segments of both common operational and common user databases, as well as data generated and used only at a user’s own site.

End-user database

These databases consist of data developed by individual end-users. Examples of these are collections of documents in spreadsheets, word processing and downloaded files.

External database

These databases contain data collected for use across multiple organizations, either freely or via subscription. The Internet Movie Database is one example.

Hypermedia databases

The World Wide Web can be thought of as a database, albeit one spread across millions of independent computing systems. Web browsers "process" this data one page at a time, while Web crawlers and other software provide the equivalent of database indexes to support search and other activities.

Operational database

These databases store detailed data about the operations of an organization. They are typically organized by subject matter, process relatively high volumes of updates using transactions. Essentially every major organization on earth uses such databases. Examples include customer databases that record contact, credit, and demographic information about a business' customers, personnel databases that hold information such as salary, benefits, skills data about employees, Enterprise resource planning that record details about product components, parts inventory, and financial databases that keep track of the organization's money, accounting and financial dealings