[Sussex] Additional to "John's stupid question"

[John D.]

Erm,

because I can't find anything about databases that makes sense to me, and 
notwithstanding what Tony posted in reply to my first Q,

perhaps someone could enlighten me.

My aim, is to get Clare's (my partner) pile of magazines, work sheets and 
other paper media that she uses for work and store it somehow on disc.

As there's quite a lot of it, and especially with the magazines, it would be 
rather convenient to be able to vet it, i.e. loose the ad's and so on, so we 
are left with just the pertinent material.

So, with that in mind, it seems that a database type "thing" would be the 
elegant solution.

But when ever I surf for database stuff, I get lots of hits about MySQL and 
PostgreSQL that I don't follow. All sorts of things about how the two apps 
can do this or that, but as I don't think that I've ever seen database 
operations "in anger", I'm not sure if that's really what I need to do.

Yes, I have seen some of the stuff that they do at my work, using MS access, 
but as that is all table related, I have no idea how, or if scanning Clares 
paperwork in would be a suitable thing to be able to "database".

I have had one suggestion that I could possibly be able to scan stuff in as 
pdf, and while I know this is commonplace with documents, I haven't seen it 
done with images.

I also understand that it could be just as easy to scan the "stuff" in and 
just burn it to cdr. Again, possible though it would mean having someway of 
checking an index to see what is on each disc. I would rather be able to open 
an application, enter a searchable keyword, and possibly see thumbnails of 
what is "thrown up".

So is it some sort of "database" that I need? (also, this maybe because I 
don't understand what some/most/all of you understand by the term database).

Hence the request for enlightenment.

regards

John

p.s. sorry if it seems that I'm just repeating things that I've posted 
earlier, but the more I investigate this, the more confused I become.