A database management system (DBMS) is a software package designed to define, manipulate, retrieve and manage data in a database. A DBMS generally manipulates the data itself, the data format, field names, record structure and file structure. It also defines rules to validate and manipulate this data.

Database management systems are set up on specific data handling concepts, as the practice of administrating a database evolves. The earliest databases only handled individual single pieces of specially formatted data. Today’s more evolved systems can handle different kinds of less formatted data and tie them together in more elaborate ways.