A database management system is a suite of software applications that together make it possible for people or businesses to store, modify, and extract information from a database. Sound like something found only in bank vaults? It's not. You can find database management systems many places in your everyday life.

That ATM that you get cash out of every week is a database management system. When you make flight reservations online, you're providing information that is entered into a database management system. Even the library that you or your children check out books from runs on a database management system.

On a more personal level, your personal computer can have its own database management system. You might have spreadsheets that contain mountains of data. Any time you fill up a spreadsheet with data and run queries to find and analyze data in different ways, you are accessing a database management system.