Database Systems The Complete Book Second Edition

Databases today are essential to every business. [...] Corporations maintain all their important records in databses. Databases are likewise found at the core of many scientific investigations. They represent the data gathered by astronomers, by investigators of the human genome, and by biochemists exploring properties of proteins, among many other scientific activities.

the power of databases comes from a body of knowledge and technology that has developed over several decades and is embolied in specialized software called a databse management system, or DBMS[...] A DBMS is a powerfool tool for creating and managing large amounts of data efficiently and allowing it to persist over long periods of time, safely. These systems are among the most complex types of software available.