Analytic databases (a.k.a. OLAP- On Line Analytical Processing) are primarily static, read-only databases which store archived, historical data used for analysis. For example, a company might store sales records over the last ten years in an analytic database and use that database to analyze marketing strategies in relationship to demographics.

On the web, you will often see analytic databases in the form of inventory catalogs such as the one shown previously from Amazon.com. An inventory catalog analytical database usually holds descriptive information about all available products in the inventory.

Web pages are generated dynamically by querying the list of available products in the inventory against some search parameters. The dynamically-generated page will display the information about each item (such as title, author, ISBN) which is stored in the database.

A data warehouse stores data from current and previous years — data extracted from the various operational databases of an organization. It becomes the central source of data that has been screened, edited, standardized and integrated so that it can be used by managers and other end-user professionals throughout an organization. Data warehouses are characterized by being slow to insert into but fast to retrieve from. Recent developments in data warehousing have led to the use of a Shared nothing architecture to facilitate extreme scaling.

These are databases of local work-groups and departments at regional offices, branch offices, manufacturing plants and other work sites. These databases can include segments of both common operational and common user databases, as well as data generated and used only at a user’s own site.

These databases consist of a variety of data files developed by end-users at their workstations. Examples of these are collections of documents in spreadsheets, word processing and even downloaded files.

These databases provide access to external, privately-owned data online — available for a fee to end-users and organizations from commercial services. Access to a wealth of information from external database is available for a fee from commercial online services and with or without charge from many sources in the Internet.

These are a set of interconnected multimedia pages at a web-site. They consist of a home page and other hyperlinked pages[citation needed] of multimedia or mixed media such as text, graphic, photographic images, video clips, audio etc.

In navigational databases, queries find objects primarily by following references from other objects. Traditionally navigational interfaces are procedural, though one could characterize some modern systems like XPath as being simultaneously navigational and declarative.

In-memory databases primarily rely on main memory for computer data storage. This contrasts with database management systems which employ a disk-based storage mechanism. Main memory databases are faster than disk-optimized databases since[citation needed] the internal optimization algorithms are simpler and execute fewer CPU instructions. Accessing data in memory provides faster and more predictable performance than disk. In applications where response time is critical, such as telecommunications network equipment that operates emergency systems, main memory databases are often used.

Document-oriented databases are computer programs designed for document-oriented applications. These systems may be implemented as a layer above a relational database or an object database. As opposed to relational databases, document-based databases do not store data in tables with uniform sized fields for each record. Instead, they store each record as a document that has certain characteristics. Any number of fields of any length can be added to a document. Fields can also contain multiple pieces of data.

A real-time database is a processing system designed to handle workloads whose state may change constantly. This differs from traditional databases containing persistent data, mostly unaffected by time. For example, a stock market changes rapidly and dynamically. Real-time processing means that a transaction is processed fast enough for the result to come back and be acted on right away. Real-time databases are useful for accounting, banking, law, medical records, multi-media, process control, reservation systems, and scientific data analysis. As computers increase in power and can store more data, real-time databases become integrated into society and are employed in many applications.

The standard of business computing as of 2009[update], relational databases are the most commonly used database today[citation needed]. It uses the table to structure information so that it can be readily and easily searched through.