Marc Benioff knew that Seibel had already started a river flowing of demand for a customer relationship management (CRM) database package for businesses, but they were a traditional software model.

FORBES: 1 Critical Marketing Rule Steve Jobs and Marc Benioff Taught Us, and Google Helps Us Apply for Free

SaaS software applications such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning are deployed alongside database and middleware software.

FORBES: Oracle Gets Juice From Software-As-A-Service

At OCE Interactive, we have constructed a database (we refer to it as a backbone) that maps out the relationship between historical and expected EPS growth versus dividend payout for all companies market wide over the past 20 years.

FORBES: Job Well Done, Cisco

So Dr. Mark Daniel DeBoer, an associate professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and his colleagues turned to a large database of 10, 700 children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey, Birth Cohort to investigate the relationship between the type of milk children drank and their body mass index (BMI).

CNN: Drinking skim milk may not lower child obesity risk

This threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people and where they were situated.

BBC: RELATED BBC SITES