Databases are a way of storing not just data, but also detailed metadata (data about data), and the relationships between data items. They make it easy to search and manage data, and can have a lot of advantages over files.

For "Big" computing - things done on clusters or specialised machines, you might find yourself producing a huge amount of rather small files. This is "impolite" to others using the resource, might be inefficient in compute terms, and might well be inefficient in terms of further data processing.

This page will contain a short introduction to SQL databases, how to use them, and some examples of using them for research data management.

Content TBC, expected by Jan 2023