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Digital computers really began to make inroads in business with the development of the computer database. After all, for the most part businesses do not, in their day-to-day activities, make a lot of use of the complex math that computers perform so quickly. Even the spreadsheet is something that tends to be used for planning and analysis, not for daily buying and selling. (And computers were being used in business for years before the development of the spreadsheet.)
But databases are different. Businesses have to keep track of things. Accounts, orders, parts, equipment, items for sale, inventories of merchandise. Every item that’s sold is one that’s purchased, and the transactions have to be recorded and they have to balance. Invoices have to be sent to customers, and their payments recorded. This is all done through databases, but whereas 15 years ago few people had daily contact with a computer database, now millions of us do. Cashiers in supermarkets using POS (point-of-sale) terminals are entering transactions in a computer database. Anyone on the Internet who looks up a movie on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) or the All Movie Guide is accessing a database.
This chapter introduces database concepts: the fields, records, and files that make up databases. You’ll read about creating queries and reports to pull information out of databases. The chapter also discusses briefly some of the distinctions between a rather simple database, such as one that might contain all your friends’ names and addresses, and an enterprise database, which a credit card company would use to track your credit card account and which is being "hit" by thousands of transactions each minute, nationwide or worldwide.
Finally, the chapter discusses some of the implications that computer databases have for personal privacy, and the increasing amount of information about us that is being stored in them, usually without us, or anyone perhaps, having much control over how it is used.