Data base (or database): any collection of data that is specially organized for rapid search and retrieval, usually by a computer. Databases are organized and integrated in such a way as to facilitate the accessing, manipulation, and deletion of data in conjunction with various data-processing operations.
The information in many databases consists of natural-language texts of documents. Information is retrieved from these computerized records based on the presence in them of words or short phrases that are identical to those posed in the user’s query. In a typical query, the user provides a sequence of characters, such as the title of a journal or the name of a subject area, and the computer searches in the database for a corresponding sequence of characters and provides the source materials in which those characters appear. Queries are the principal means by which users retrieve database information.