a collection of related data
has meaning and rules for relations between data elements
business: payroll, inventory control, banking, reservations
computer aided design (CAD)
computer aided software environment (CASE)
telecommunications systems
archiving and warehousing (large data set storage and analysis)
multimedia (object oriented databases)
data is formatted
data has integrity
data can be manipulated
(usually) large amounts of data
there is concurrency control
data is secure
has data independence
details of data storage and access is removed from application program
storage and access controlled by DBMS
applications access data through DBMS
reduces redundancy
minimizes risk of inconsistency
restricts access
can be accessed by multiple applications
data independent of application