A database is a collection of data elements stored in a computer in a systematic way, such that a computer program can consult it to answer questions. The answers to those questions become information that can be used to make decisions that may not be made with the data elements alone. The computer program used to manage and query a database is known as a database management system (DBMS). The properties of database systems are studied in information science.

A collection of interrelated data, often with controlled redundancy, organized according to a schema to serve one or more applications. The data are stored so that they can be used by different programs without concern for the data structure or organization. A common approach is used to add new data and to modify and retrieve existing data.

A database is a collection of information organized in such a way that a computer program can quickly select desired pieces of data. Relational databases are organized by fields, records, and tables.
A field is a single piece of information,
A record is one complete set of fields,
A table is a collection of records.
A generally uses a relational database as its content repository. Storing content in fields rather than static pages makes that content appropriate for dynamic delivery.

At the core of the concept of a database is the idea of a collection of generic facts, or pieces of knowledge. Facts may be structured in a number of ways, known as database models. For instance, one database model is to associate each fact with a record representing an entity (such as a person), and to arrange these entities into trees or hierarchies -- the hierarchical database model. Another model is to arrange facts into sets of values which satisfy logical predicates -- the relational database model.

Strictly speaking, the "database" is the collection of facts and the software is the "database management system" or DBMS. However, in practice, many database administrators and programmers use the term "database" to cover both meanings.

Database management systems range from the extremely simple to the highly complex. Differences among DBMS  include whether they are capable of ensuring the integrity of the data, whether they may be used by many users at once; what sorts of conclusions they can be programmed to compute from a set of data.