- Not just traditional, numeric/textual
- Research 70s biased
- Digital media
- Video servers (atom/bbc/youtube)
- Multimedia databases
- Web site, collection of diverse data types
- Google, AltaVista
- Stock Exchange
- Futures, Currency markets, trends
- Databases comprising not only data, but modelling algortihms
- Microsoft's WinFS
Databases don't have to store just text. Increasingly Database servers are storing, indexing and delivering rich-media content, explicitly images, audio and video.
Microsoft's next generation File storage system (WinFS) is a relational database. From a user perspective, searching (the process of indexing content by keyword) is already mainstream. Users are moving away from rigid directory structures (files and folders) and towards keyword-tagged content.