| One of the biggest uses of databases is for web sites. Every website which allows you to login in, and many that don't, is backed by some sort of database. This is because databases are well suited to storing user information. For example, consider an email application which has users and email. You might have one table to store users, and one to store messages. The advantage of using a database rather than plain files is that they can be searched very efficiently and are extremely fast. Although Access can be used to power websites, it is not well suited to this task because it allows only about three simultaneous users. This means that if you were the fourth person to log on to such a site, you would have to wait for the other three people to finish logging in. If a site has thousands of users, this would quickly become a problem. It is in this type of situation that so-called "Client/Server databases" come into play. In this type of database, the actual data resides on a central server and a large number of requests can be made of it simultaneously. With such a server, thousands of users would be able to log in almost simultaneously. |
