I've often been lured by the word "database". For me, it means clean, structured data, formal relationships between tables, no (or limited) duplicate rows, etc. When someone tells me they have a database, I instinctively picture a relational database. It turns out that the perception of what a database is *really* depends on who you are talking to. For some, a "database" may well be a folder with a collection of CSV files with different data structures. For me, that's a data collection.