A very significant aspect of data management is documenting, defining, implementing, and testing the set of operations that is required for a specific application. In short, there are two distinct sets of operations that are used for data management, as follows:

• An operation that works on a singular object: As an example, an operation that crops an image, extracting a sub-area from an area of pixels, is a single-object operation, because we consider the image to be a single object.
• An operation that works on collections of data objects: This operation deals with merging two collections together, in order to form a larger collection.