Everyone at Marsh Marine has access to an online database, a type of Intranet that everyone can view and update.

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Many bundling arrangements take the form of site-licensing agreements, under which companies or other organisations pay a single fee for unlimited online access to a database, say, or a software package.

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They can now opt to make their trees public for all Ancestry users to access, thus growing the online database.

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Front-end applications access the database to display data online.

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The online system could not access their records due to the way they were stored on HMRC's main database, she added.

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