2. Database examples

Search engines

Maybe you don't realise it but you probably use a database almost everyday of your life. You will no doubt be familiar with using a search engine. Examples of search engines include Google, Altavista, Dogpile and Bing.

Search engines work by cataloging all of the content on every web page on the internet that their web crawlers find. When you enter a keyword search into a search engine it will find every result that matches your terms and present them in the form of a list to you.

School registers

Most schools now have some form of electronic registration. These might be fairly sophisticated and include fingerprint scanners or cards that need to be swiped. They might require the teacher to record attendance on the computer or a special hand-held electronic register. Even if your teacher still uses a paper-based register the daily register sheet will be scanned into a computer (probably using an optical mark reader (OMR).

The attendance records are stored in a database. Every student will have their own individual record in the database and it will be updated every time data is entered.

The database can be searched or sorted for data about the attendance of individual students, school-wide attendance or attendance for a particular week/term.