If they use any table or any of the features where there are a group of objects (pages) that have different status or properties, they are using databases.
It's pretty much something you accidentally create and use in notion without knowing unless all you are doing is writing documents.
Anything needs to be shown on a table, calendar, etc. is a database. It doesn't matter if user deliberately uses it or not. One can have a look at all the Notion's templates (https://www.notion.so/templates). All featured templates have databases. I also looked at all categories and their front pages filled with templates /w databases. Maybe 1 per category without it.
Thank you!
I can‘t stand that each week I come across some „Notion alternative“ of which none offer databases, except for Anytype.
Without that, those „Notion alternatives“ are just alternatives to plain text note taking apps. And there‘s plenty to choose from already.
They hold organized data and have integrations and views for those data. It's nothing fancy like a mature sql-database-system, but you have different high-level views you can configure through the interface. So you can make tables with filters, a kanban, calendar, timeline and some more[1]. People use it for task-lists, project-management, to manage their movie and book-lists, etc.
