Database
In short
A database is a store that keeps data structured and lets several people work on it at once without overwriting each other. It knows the relationships between records – an order belongs to a customer, a line item to an order – and can answer questions from them that a spreadsheet would leave you to do by hand.
How you know Excel has run out
Three signs, and they usually arrive together: the file is called «final_v3_new», two people cannot work in it at the same time, and the same customer address appears differently in four places.
The trigger is not row count, it is concurrency. A spreadsheet is a document – it belongs to one person when it comes to it. A database is a shared state, and that is exactly what a business needs once more than one person writes.
The mistake we see most
Thinking a database is a program you open. It is the substrate; what you operate is an application on top of it. A CRM or an ERP are applications with a database underneath – the database itself is something nobody sees.
The second mistake concerns backups. A database cannot be copied meaningfully while it is running. Back it up as if it were a file and you end up, on the day it matters, with a copy caught halfway. What a tested restore looks like: backup.
What Switzerland adds
As soon as personal data sits in it – and customer addresses are personal data – the FADP duties apply: appropriate technical and organisational measures (Art. 8 FADP, SR 235.1) and access limited to what is necessary.
Two practical consequences: not everyone needs to reach every table, and deletion periods have to be executable. A database from which individual personal records cannot be removed on request becomes a problem the first time someone asks.
How we handle it
We design the data model before the interface – anything stored under the wrong structure can only be corrected later by migrating it. Delivery under internal tools and web apps.
The brief rarely opens with «we need a database». It opens with «we keep the same list in three places».
A term in your quote that nobody explained?
In a strategy call we translate the offer in front of you – even when it did not come from us.