As mentioned in the Preface, one purpose of this book is to explain the basic concepts of modern relational-database theory and show how these concepts are realized in Microsoft Access. Allow me to amplify on this rather lofty goal.
To take a very simple view, which will do nicely for the purposes of this introductory discussion, a database is just a collection of related data. A database management system , or DBMS, is a system that is designed for two main purposes:
To add, delete, and update the data in the database
To provide various ways to view (on screen or in print) the data in the database
If the data is simple and there is not very much of it, then a database can consist of a single table. In fact, a simple database can easily be maintained even with a word processor!