When all these facts about a single person are combined with facts about other people, the collective data becomes a collective mess. Organization of data can be a big problem. Once organized, storing the data for future use is important, but worthless unless there is a way to retrieve the data for some purpose. Data collected, organized, and stored, with a facility to retrieve it makes a database . Collecting, organizing, storing, and retrieving are some of the big issues surrounding databases today.
Databases already play a big role in all our lives.
Facts about us as students, faculty, and staff are in the UMUC database. We are listed in the databases used by the U.S. military and the German immigration services. While many databases are huge, encompassing hundreds of thousands of facts, others are small and used by individuals for desktop applications. In this class we will explore the nature of data and the concept of a database. We will apply these concepts using Microsoft Access 2000, a light-weight desktop database program.