Database Concepts: What are databases? I'm writing this article to answer some questions as part of my first assignment in a course designed to provide a better understanding of database concepts. There are many different types of databases, different database implementations, and different database software applications. So how do all this database stuff work? I have worked with databases for most of my professional career at many different levels. Sometimes as a user, you enter data, retrieve information, and compile reports. I also provided assistance and support to help maintain a database system. More recently I do both types of activities. I never stopped to think about what was actually happening in the background while using these systems. My goal is to learn more about what databases are and how they work. Why will this course be important for my career? The course I'm taking is called Database Concepts. This course and what I learn will be important for my career. My profession, as a PACS administrator, requires me to operate and maintain a completely database-driven system. PACS stands for Picture Archiving and Communications System. The system receives patient information and diagnostic medical images and stores them. You need to be able to query for a particular patient and retrieve images associated with that patient. All patient information is held in the database, images are stored separately, and the database maintains pointers to the images. Understanding how this information is structured is very important. I manipulate this data daily to ensure its integrity, so the more I understand the structure, the better quality of work I can do. This course will also allow me to better understand whether an MS Access application would work better than some of the systems I use today. MS Access is an application that I have available, but that I don't use. Learning more about Access will help me organize some of the data I currently keep in spreadsheets. Generating reports and running some trending will help communicate this information to department leadership. The information I will learn from this course will be important for my career; the key is to use what I learn! Microsoft Access can be considered a "business tool"."?