Information Storage

Information can be stored in a variety of ways: hard copy information such as books and paper documents can be stored in libraries or large filing systems.

Electronic information is stored in very similar ways. Computer systems use libraries in which data is sorted and placed into categories to await usage.

A database is another example of a storage system: it enables large amounts of information to be kept in a series of records. These records will sort the information according to a set of values. For example, a database which contains employee information will have individual records of each employee. This will show their name, age, sex, date of birth etc.

The most common form of database is the ‘relational’ database: as the name suggest, this is where records are grouped together because they share the same attributes. In other words, they have a relationship with each other.

Information is also stored on the Internet. There are over 80 million web sites on the Internet at present and the number is growing. This information is held on large servers and when information is requested by a user it is retrieved either from a database or a server and sent to the user. This is called a ‘client-server’ relationship.