database

A collection of related data organized in a way to optimize access to this data. A relational database organizes data into tables, rows, and columns. Informix databases are relational databases. At run time, a separate database engine process is the portion of the database management system that actually manipulates the data in the database files. To access a database, a 4GL application must specify it with the DATABASE statement and must use SQL statements.

See also column, database engine, process, row, SQL, system catalog, table.