Where do I initialize a database?

Where can I find a picture of a database?

• The CEO of my company is non-technical and he keeps asking me what a database looks like.  Is there a good picture of a database I can show him? Does anyone have an artist's depiction of a database? The CEO is NON-technical.  Diagrams mean nothing to them. They want to "see the database". I showed them the information schema and how to use mysql on the command line. They need to be able to visualize the database.

• Answer:

  Okay, I don't really want to be helpful here, especially because I think this is a troll, but I feel like there probably are a lot of people out there for whom visualizing a database is actually a problem. Basically, the best way to think about a database is as a bunch of Excel spreadsheets.  Each row in the spreadsheet contains a datum, and the columns describe what the datum actually contains.  For example, in the spreadsheet below[1] (which rendered really shittily for some reason, please click on the image to see it clearly), each row corresponds to a different organization, and the information we store about each organization is defined by the columns at the top (Name, Address1, City, State, Zip, Phone, and Fax). Each spreadsheet is equivalent to what database people call a table.  So if you're ever shown a schema in SQL, just look at the column names and picture each table as a spreadsheet where the column names are in the top row, and the spreadsheet rows are filled with imaginary data that kind of fit what the column names describe. [1] I got this image from http://www.flatmysql.com/help/excel.htm.  If you are the owner of this page and object to your image appearing here, let me know, and I will replace it with one of the gajilliion other images of spreadsheets on the web.