Databases allow you to deal with large amounts of information resourcefully and easily. They can do things that static pages cannot, such as serving a different advertisement each time a user views a web page. And they make tasks easy that would be difficult with CGI and cetainly impossible with HTML.
Database driven sites too have many advantages. The obvious one is that they can store, recover, and analyse data. They have the ability to easily update the content of a site, which is a major advantage. A database driven site has the potential, with creative coding, to present each unique visitor with an experience, which is appropriate and focused. Furthermore, databases can provide performance and security advantages over file driven systems.
Most DBMSs in use today, both on the Internet and off, are relational databases that use the SQL language for queries. Structured Query Language is a relatively simple language which you can use to access most relational databases.
There's a number of ways that can be provided for the user to navigate &
locate information in an information system, or data resource.
At the simplest end of the spectrum, if your data can be structured as a small
table and you just want to retrieve records according to one or two field values,
then a small custom program will suffice.
On the other hand, if you want to be able to search for complex interrelations in the data, then you may need a relational database.
A relational database stores information in tables. Each table stores information about a set of similar things. A table contains a set of fields with information about their attributes.
The database you choose largely depends on your existing operations, performance needs, and budget. Some of the proprietary systems are very expensive whereas open source databases such as MySQL are free depending on your server configuration.