For example, I have a phone list that I keep in my purse. This is great when I am on the road, but it doesn't help my husband at home look up a number if I have the information in my purse. We keep the master list in a database, so that we can view it in a variety of ways, print it out, and share it over our home network. Because this information is in a database, we can sift through it and create a list of people to whom we want to send Christmas cards. We can then format the selected information, and print it on labels to affix to the cards.
Databases contain specialized storage containers called tables.
In the example above, the address book would be the table. An entry in a table is known as a record. Data within a specific row would be akin to a database record. When I want to go through the address book and find all of the names and addresses for folks on my Christmas card list, I create a query. A query is a question about the data that is stored in a database.