Interacting with a web application means sending requests to a server which then retrieves data to display. The server will also handle new data that is created while using the application as well as alterations on the existing data. Since these tasks can become quite complex, the server itself is not the optimal place to handle them. Therefore, elaborate operations on data and displaying dynamic data should be performed by a suitable database software (Williams and Lane, 2006). This leaves the server with the task of delegating the data to an appropriate data storage where it is saved in a suitable scheme.
The software that has the task of maintaining the data is called a database management system. It contains a storage component that contains all the actual data as well as a management component that includes a query and data manipulation language which is used for retrieving data and operating on it (Kaufmann and Meier, 2019).