A database is an information system that is designed to handle information in an organized manner. It keeps all the information in good reference with itself and queries can be made to the database to make an inquiry into the information such as the features of some of the properties within the database. A good database should be capable of rendering information storage and retrieval services with ease and should also possess a number of characteristics that make it a good database. The properties of a good database are what make it excellent choices in addition to separating it from the rest of the pack.
Accuracy of information is something that one must look for in any database. A good database should keep an accurate record of all the information that is stored on it and nothing should change in the database no matter where it is stored. The accuracy also means that the meta-data to the information on the database should be accurate as well as this is an accurate reference to the information knowing the data-types of all the fields clearly and labeling them so inside the database. Data types dictate the relationships that are formed within the database and determine if or not a database is good enough for use or not.
Any database tends to have more than one table of information and on these tables are records that may be used to form one kind of relationship to other tables or another. The relationships formed by these records can be one-to-many or many-to-many and are a determiner of what kind of queries can be made to the information on the database. The queries can also be merged with each other in order to form results that are an accumulation of all the details of each of the tables and this forms very accurate results that can be of use to the information system users.
In addition to the relationships, there is the other aspect of making queries to the information on the database. This is another property of a good database in the sense that it makes the retrieval of information from the database easy and simplified. Even for the database that has many tables and rows upon columns of records in each table, a simple query should be able to reveal all the information about the database down to the very relationships that exist between the records.
Ease of use is another property of a good database and for many database systems, the simplicity of the design of the database is what makes it possible for the users to make use of the information with ease. The ease of use breaks the barrier between the users of the database and the database itself as well as increasing productivity for the users themselves. A database system that is known to be very easy to use also reduces the time taken in the retrieval of information from the user and this means they will be more likely to make a profit with the database.
