No matter how good you may be at your job, mistakes can and will happen. Fortunately, with a database, any new data and changes to existing data have to obey certain rules, so you can prevent mistakes from happening in the first place.
Databases avoid redundancies
The purpose of databases is to make data easily accessible for later use. The only way a sweden phone number data database can do this is by ensuring that each piece of data only exists in one place at a time. If you wanted to know the answer to a specific question, such as, “What is this person’s phone number?” or “What is the retail cost associated with this specific product code?” wouldn’t it save you more time if you simply had to look in one place to find the answer?
This becomes even more critical if your workflow is one where you need to update your data regularly. With a database, you can update information in one place and be assured that the other places where the data is referenced will automatically be updated as well—instead of manually combing through your files to try and find instances of old, outdated data.
Databases vs. Spreadsheets
Let's say that every order you place on your online store's spreadsheet also has a customer contact associated with it. What if you wanted to send free gifts to all your VIP customers?
One way to try and do this is to create a separate spreadsheet dedicated specifically to collecting customer contact information. If you do this, you’ll have the same customer information for multiple locations. If a customer changes their shipping address, this means you’ll have to manually update this information, leaving your business open to potential errors if you forget to do this work, or if you accidentally copy and paste the wrong information. You might even end up shipping the order to the wrong location! Redundancy costs you valuable time by creating unnecessary work, but perhaps more importantly, it leaves you vulnerable to errors.
Databases are powerful
Because databases are designed to make data retrieval easy, they also make it possible to process data in powerful and interesting ways. Essentially, you can ask—or “query”—your database to answer specific questions, like “how many of this type of product were sold in this specific time period” or “How do Google Ads or Facebook Ads compare for your business?”
When you query a database to answer a specific question, you can store the results of that query as a view , which in the database world is a subset of the database that you can reference later. By filtering the available information, views help people working with the database to more easily find the relevant information they need to do their job. Additionally, many databases allow you to control access to these views with granular permissions, meaning that the right people can see your data.
Many databases require you to learn specific types of programming languages in order to query your database. For example, one of the most popular languages is SQL (an acronym for structured query language) which is used in many relational database management systems. There are also database systems that come with more graphical user interfaces ( GUIs ) these days.
