Areas of applications

A database is a core component of almost every contemporary information system. In fact databases are applicable, in almost all areas of life. There are just a few examples:

• Management and Business: book-keeping and accountancy, inventory catalogs, bank accounts, production management systems.
• Engineering: equipment/part catalogs.
• Medicine: drug lists (dosage, compatibility, side effects), patient files (treatment history).
• Law: statute books, law regulations (interpretation and related cases).
• Education: book/article catalogs, Student Information System (courses, students, and their grades).

Typical operations in databases are: information retrieval, insertion, alteration and deletion, which reflect changes in the UoD. The most often used is retrieval. A particular operation (which can also be named a query) denotes a scope it is applied to, and some logical statements which provide its semantics. For example there could be the following data retrieval operations in a medical database:

• search for all patients which have been treated with a given drug, or
• search for all drugs that are targeted towards curing some given disease.