An organised collection of data stored electronically with instant access, searching and sorting facilities.

• A. Spreadsheet
• B. Database
• C. Archive
• D. Data warehouse

Answer: (B)

A database is an organized collection of data stored electronically that is designed for quick retrieval, searching, and sorting of records. It holds data in structured formats (like tables and fields) and uses indexing and queries to pull up specific information fast, even when there are many records. This makes it ideal for managing ongoing business data such as customer details, orders, and inventory, where you need to search by a field (like surname or product code), filter results, and sort by date or value.

Spreadsheets can sort and search, but they’re mainly for numerical calculations and smaller datasets and aren’t built to manage many related records with data integrity across multiple tables. An archive is long-term storage meant for rarely accessing data, so instant searching isn’t a focus. A data warehouse is geared toward analyzing large volumes of data from multiple sources for reporting, not day-to-day transaction processing with fast, individual record retrieval.