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Even if it's stored as a spreadsheet, or a "flat file" - I can't think of anything that doesn't store some data these days.
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Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Agreed, that option is pretty useless.
It would make sense as kind of "DBA / Database backend programming" if you are deeply into triggers, stored procedures, jobs, datawarehouse.. something like that.
then there would be _way_ less answers on this one 
(Still an extremely interesting topic --- I have been sql server and oracle dba for years and we build hundreds of gigabytes large data warehouses... pretty cool stuff)
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Or working ON a DB as in writing the DBMS.
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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True that. Application can't survive without (database) storage!
If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.
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Really? In 7 years I never touched a DB... without any problem to any "application".
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Well it depends. In my entire carrier I have not worked on any system which directly/indirectly do not use any database. For you it may be different case.
If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.
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Yes, but we don't just store it. We moved it around, change a few numbers and then move it around some more!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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My first encounter with databases was learning CODASYL databases at the university; the textbooks covered the relational model as a theoretical concept only. During the database course, our professor went on a tour to the USA and came back with a tear in his eye, telling that he had actually seen such a database, for real! It was operational and working, just as the theory described it. That is quite fantastic, isn't it?
During the next few years, we followed the 2NF, 3NF, 4NF, ... development (well, at the research level it had been developed a few years earlier; we saw it creeping into the textbooks). ACID was of course essential, without ACID completely implemented, we considered "DBMS" to be a misnomer. We studied various locking schemes, distributed DBMSes (quote from a PhD student: "I early learned that query optimization in a distributed DBMS is an NP complete problem, but slowly I understood that that is a gross oversimplification").
Then came the late 80s and 90s ... and people started watering out the concepts, almost to the level of homeopathy: You don't need any Isolation in a single-user PC system. As long as the application does it right, the DBMS doesn't need consistency mechanisms. In a single-user system, the risk of an operation being interrupted halfway is very little, and the application can take responsibility for issuing allowed operation sequences only. Durability is done through good backup procedures for the disk.
Relational algrebra operations? Naah... the tables are the same, no matter how you operate them, so it is a "relational" database even if it doesn't provide "relational operations", right? Anything like "foreign keys" can be realized in the application, if you need it.
And so on. If you go back to, say, the VAX/VMS file system, it certainly provided a lot more than just a sequence of bytes: The file system provided record structures with multiple fields and an ISAM-like index mechanism. VMS was certainly not alone: Lots of pre-Unix file systems offered record handling and ISAM/B-tree indexes. Then came Unix, and everything above byte sequences were re-classified as a "database".
In that perspective, you are right: Pretty much every app put some structure on top of a stored byte sequence. So, call it a DB, if it stores a sequence of records in a disk file.
Even if it has nothing to do with ACID and foreign keys and normalization and relational operations.
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Member 7989122 wrote: If you go back to, say, the VAX/VMS file system
I will breathe a name I've not heard in a long time. A long, long time. DATATRIEVE[^]
Software Zen: delete this;
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Static websites come to mind. I can imagine some developers are still having to work on those.
Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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I'll add another "yes, but..." to the pile. All of my applications use XML files as their persistence mechanism. While several of them can record data to a data base, the DB isn't a central data component to the app.
The modern perception is that applications are developed using the web browser or a mobile app for presentation, a data base for persistence, and server glue that ties the whole thing together. All other forms of applications are old-school edge cases and certainly not au currant. Even the Internet of Things seems bent in this direction.
To my mind, viewing every application as a data base app is an example of having a BFH (Big eleFanting Hammer) and every problem is a nail.
Software Zen: delete this;
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