What do databases excel at?

Question

I'm trying to get my team to think about only asking the database to do things it can do really well. I believe that when they stop thinking of the DBMS as an omniscient, omnipotent being and start treating it as a useful--albeit dumb--tool, they can begin to approach optimization and database design with the right attitude. That got me wondering: what types of operations does a modern database excel at? I'll start the list with the obvious tasks:

• Join using indexes
• Filter using indexes
• Order on a minimal number of columns

Any others you can think of?

EDIT: Feel free to add database anti-patterns as well, such as:

• Storing and manipulating binary files
• Handling hierarchal data (most databases)

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Note for the picky: I do know the distinction between a database and a DBMS, but most people don't know (or bother) to recognize it, so I'm intentionally interchanging the concepts.

Answer 1

One important one that you missed was aggregate functions: sum, average, min, max, count, etc. (At least, the database should be really good at doing min, max, count on indexed columns).

Answer 2

well, there's the most obvious one:

store a ****load of information in a convenient, organised and memory efficient manner.