From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing: (http://www.foldoc.org/, Editor Denis Howe)
1. One or more large structured sets of persistent data, usually associated with software to update and query the data. A simple database might be a single file containing many records, each of which contains the same set of fields where each field is a certain fixed width.
{Carol E. Brown's tutorial (http://www2.bus.orst.edu/faculty/brownc/lectures/db_tutor/)}.
2. A collection of nodes managed and stored in one place and all accessible via the same server. Links outside this are "external", and those inside are "internal".