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The suit, tie and sample case are mostly a thing of the past. Cold calls are not always as cold as they used to be. Best of all, conducting business wearing fuzzy bunny slippers is easier than it ever used to be. A lot of the praise for this can be put on e-business and databases - two entities that are inextricably intertwined.

Databases are a sophisticated way of storing information. Their purpose has always been to store and catalog information so that it can be retrieved later. Business has understood this implicitly. They have long used databases to store customer information, product information and financial records. Over time, they have grown to use databases for more and more tasks, helping to automate and track operations.

e-Business is even more dependent upon databases. Without databases, e-business would not exist. e-Business is about taking how businesses have always operated and making them available electronically when and where customers want it. This could mean an individual buying an antique doll at 3 am off eBay, a college student getting a textbook from Amazon the week before classes start, or businesses ordering another gross of fasteners because a new order from overseas just arrived.

Databases are in constant use by almost every e-Business in existence. I say almost every, because there are a few tiny e-business operations that use e-mail and static web pages. The rest, no matter how small, use databases in some part of their operations - even if they do not realize it. From eBay sellers to Amazon Associates to Google Adsense providers, all of these business operations rely heavily on databases.

Independent operations use even more databases. Blogs and product catalogs rely on databases. Shopping carts and knowledge bases are also built on databases. Even simple forums and discussion boards are built around databases. Larger businesses add customer databases, product databases, support databases, financial databases, operational data stores (ODS), data warehouses (DW), and much more.

It is safe to say that the larger a business it, the more databases it uses. The more that it conducts e-business, the greater that dependency gets. This is because the flexibility and power of databases grow as they get bigger. It is difficult for somebody handcrafting goods for sale, with no employees, to learn and implement databases on their own to gather and analyze information to improve their business. They will be too busy keeping up with demand. Large

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