What is a Database?

What is a Database?

We’re swamped by information every second of every day. Sometimes this information is not useful and we forget about it. But if the information is useful, we remember it, or we could say we store it — in our brains.

This same idea applies to data and databases. Think of databases as the storage units for important information. We can use a database to store things like user information, customer orders, blog post text, comments, etc… These items are all important for us to keep track of to access later and potentially update.

While we would want some users to interact with our database, we might not want everyone to have the same permissions. This means depending on who the user is, they would use the database differently. Imagine if we had a form that took in user comments and stored them in a database. We want regular users to be able to add to the database, but we certainly don’t want them to edit any existing comments. However, we could grant permission to administrators, aka admins, to access old comments and update them if needed.

Later on, we could even use the information from the database and display it on our site. Going back to our comments example, we could display user comments like seen on review sites.

With a database, all these actions are possible — and with Wix and their built-in tools like collections, datasets, and dynamic pages to name a few, these actions are made even easier.