<sect1 id="intro-database">
    <title>The &digikam; Database</title>

    <sect2 id="intro-database-intro">
        <title>Introduction</title>

        <para>
           Everyone knows about database, it is used to store data. As all other photographs management programs, &digikam; too uses the database for some obvious reasons like avoiding data duplication, reducing data redundancy, a quick search engine, and greater data integrity. Moreover, the cost of data entry, storage and retrieval are drastically reduced. Additionally, any user can access the data using query language.
        </para>

        <para>
           Talking in particular about &digikam;, the Albums, Album Roots, Tags, Thumbnails, Face Recognition Data, Image Metadata, File Paths, Settings &etc; are all stored in different database files.
        </para>

        <para>

            The &digikam; actually manages more than one databases. For convenience, it is broadly categorized in three:

            <orderedlist>

                <listitem><para>
                    Core database for all collection properties, &ie; it hosts all albums, images and searches data.
                </para></listitem>

                <listitem><para>
                    Thumbnails database for compressed thumbnails &ie; to host image thumbs using wavelets compression images (PGF format).
                </para></listitem>

                <listitem><para>
                    Face database for storing face recognition metadata &ie; to host face histograms for faces recognition.
                </para></listitem>

            </orderedlist>

        </para>

    </sect2>

    <sect2 id="intro-database-config">
        <title>Technical Background and Configuration</title>

        <para>
            The whole details of database settings is mostly given in the setup section about <link linkend="using-setup-database">&digikam; databases</link>.
        </para>

    </sect2>

</sect1>

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