How would you explain “How a database works” to a 70 year old farmer?

Answer 1

I would use the analogy of everyday paper-based databases, such as address books, checkbooks and the such.

An address book is a database.

Each entry in the phone book is a record or row.

Each item within an entry (e.g. First Name, Phone Number, City) is a field or column within the row.

The tabbed pages showing the letters of the alphabet in the phone book is like an index, which speeds lookup of a specific item.

Electronic databases are just like these paper databases except they are stored digitally on disk. In addition, eletronic databases are often able to respond to special commands (i.e. SQL) for manipulating the database.

There is a command for adding new entries to the database (INSERT), for changing an entry (UPDATE), for deleting an entry (DELETE) and for looking up an entry (SELECT ... WHERE).

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

A database is simply a file of data. For example, if you are in fact a "70 year-old-farmer on Medicare," you could create an Excel file to keep track of your medical claims. Your database would consist of:
Date of Service
Date of Medicare's response
What the service was for
The actual charge
What Medicare allowed
What Medicare paid
If you had to pay out anything
How much
Check Number
Date

This way, if you had to make a call or a billing service called you, you would have all this information at hand. I used to do this for my mother.

Answer 3

you can tell him that A database is a collection of information stored in a computer in a systematic way, such that a computer program can consult it to answer questions, or give him an example make a spread sheet that contains a simple inventory of for example farm animals and show it to him explaining that this is how the database should look, ( what does a farmer whose 70 years old need the database for???)

Answer 4

Try this: The farmer is one bit of data. His neighbors are also bits of data. The database stores the bits of data and knows where it is stored by an index. Your farmers index is his postal address. His neighbors indexes are their postal addresses. The database finds the desired data by using the index just like the postal carrier finds your farmer by his address.

Answer 5

tell him its a huge store of data (just like a granary, only for data and not grain)
then tell him the advantages of having such a store
- like rainfall prediction
- best seasonal crops
- irrigation cycle

etc.