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Horatio: I need a report on all the walls ever made ever.
Tech Guy: I'm on it... According to this, this particular model of wall is of an excellent quality. It doesn't creak. Unless... there's a body behind it."
.*cough* The Other Wiki *cough*
A special Applied Phlebotinum used primarily in Police Procedural dramas.
No matter what sort of clue the Crime Scene lab has found (blood, wire, rope, oil, perfume, etc), somebody has manufactured a database designed to search through them all. Not only that, our heroes at the crime lab have purchased a copy of this software, the interface devices to input the data in question and have acquired the expertise to use this software (which has so far never been used in another one of their cases) with 100% accuracy on the first attempt.
It should be noted that some of these " magical databases" actually exist, and are in use by forensics labs, though they aren't quite as stunningly accurate or omniscient as the Police Procedural suggests.
Forensics labs also have an out for many of these magical databases, since it's generally believable that they would have a database of common murder weapons or components of weapons.
Magical Databases almost always have a Viewer Friendly Interface.
Examples:
- CSI is the king of the Magical Database. They have demonstrated databases on blood, hair, rope, wire, shoe prints, tire treads, tire rubber compositions, and even clown makeup patterns. There was a Lampshade Hanging in a sixth season episode, in which a character sarcastically suggested searching a database to discover the brand of a hot dog.
- And yes, there is a national clown registry to prevent identical makeup.
- Amusingly subverted in one episode where Greg is dissapointed to learn that there is no hotdog database & winds up spending his entire year's food budget on various brands of hotdogs in an attempt to find a match to one found in a vic's stomach (He thought the department would re-imburse him. They didn't).
- Don't forget the software/database that allows one to find where a picture in New York was taken by measuring the skyline in comparison to a reference height (while the technique is sound, there is no such software).
- However, one episode shows them using Photosynth
 .
- In fact, it's when CSI avoids the trope that it can be jarring. A reoccurring scene is the local trace evidence guy naming a compound, and the CSI identifying the compound's common name, and it's uses, including the more arcane (say, Jeweller grinder lubricant) on the top of their head. Said arcane use are always the key to cracking the case. This gets jarring because there ARE databases to identify the most common uses of chemicals.
- Star Trek must hold the freakin' copyright on the Magical Database cause there are like 1500 of them in the series and movies.
Data - can calculate the probability of a successful saucer section separation at high-warp in mere seconds, even though it's never been attempted before.
Spock - can calculate the equations for time travel and memorize Hamlet in the same movie.
The holodeck - can recreate any setting or fictional story known to Man and several other species. (In one of the books, the holodeck can even replay every Opera performance from 1400 to the year 2356)
And of course, The Enterprise Main Computer - carries all kinds of info like the launch codes to the Voyager probe built over 200 years earlier, or the command codes to every other Federation ship (why you'd keep something like that on a starship that can be accessed by an enemy is beyond this troper)
- In an episode of NCIS, Abby, the forensic scientist, tells us that her ex-boyfriend has made a database of databases after using a magic database of the measures of car fronts.
- It might be observed that Sherlock Holmes kept such databases in his head, being able to identify, for example, varieties of tobacco after examination of the ash (he had "written a monograph" on the subject). He also had a substantial collection of home-made biographies, which were usually spoken aloud by Watson for the reader's benefit. So, despite its modern-tech dressing, this is a pretty old detective-story trope.
- Lord Peter Wimsey also did this - he had a home-made "Who's Who" of the underworld, and once managed to identify the maker of a hat which had had its label removed, purely from the style. (Parker remarks that if he hadn't got the hatter, they'd have tried him on the man's dress suit, similarly de-labelled.)
- Holmes also kept paper files on crime and stuff he felt was important.
- Almost every depiction of Batman has this, whether it's his own vast knowledge (a la Sherlock Holmes), the Batcave computer, or a combination of both.
- In one Justice League Of America issue, it is shown that Batman's database of fingerprints looks at the magical databases of the Batcave, the GCPD, AFIS, JLA Headquarters and Superman's fortress of solitude. This allows him to determine the identity of a 31st century superhero because Superman had been friends with him the past... err... future...
- In recent Batman continuity, Oracle has taken on this role, in part. This raises the question of whether it's more work to draw panels with Oracle and her speech bubbles in, or to draw a computer screen displaying the same information.
- Torchwood's main characters are a secret organization with nationwide database records sorted by an ancient alien computer system. The team is capable of literally retconning anything by changing the database.
- On Angel, Wolfram & Hart has access to several databases which actually are magical.
- Before Angel's team got access to these they used "Demons, Demons, Demons, The Demon Database".
- This is almost the entire purpose of Riley's character in Painkiller Jane—to run the computers that have access to these things.
- Bourne Identity: The US government can identify a German citizen and everything she's done her entire life and her family history within moments from a blurry picture.
- While her every place of residence and every phone call is a little far fetched, finding the identity of a person who tried to apply for an American citizenship in the US embassy Bourne escaped from isn't too hard to believe.
- You can do a search for matching faces but it takes a lot of time and computer power, unless you are searching through a very small base.
- John Doe features a hero that displays ability of knowing everything that can be known about on earth. He's basically a walking and talking magical database.
- And similar to John Doe, there's Kyle, from Kyle XY, who didn't know every trivial fact, only things like mathematical formulas. Well, until he spent a single day reading the World Book.
- Very similar to the Sherlock Holmes example above, Inspector Lunge from Monster keeps an absurdly expansive encyclopdeia on practically everything in his head by constantly making a typing motion and saying that he's just calling up the memories as he needs them, or something along those lines.
- Film variant: in the 2008 film Iron Man, Tony Stark, having been frozen out of his company by villain Obidiah Stane, asks his assistant Pepper Potts to hack into Stark's office computer to retrieve some critical files from the company mainframe. Not very magical until Potts stumbles across a video file of Stark's earlier having been taken hostage by a terrorist group. In the video the terrorists are making their demands in some foreign, Arabic-like language. Potts simply clicks a "Translate" button on the video viewer interface, and the video soundtrack is translated into perfect (and appropriately accented) English.
- This increases in Magic when you realise that the only justification for this would be that Stane somehow already had it translated, a process which likely took some time - a believable handwave, given the level of technology Stark surrounds himself with. But, as an earlier scene showed, Stane is fluent in generic-Middle-Eastern.
- From a Western Animation: From 'Jem' episode, "In Search of the Stolen Album" in which Synergy, Jem's super-computer is able to scan clues that "Misfits"'s treasure hunt joke on the Holograms in a matter of moments—and even the reasons behind the places.
- Blakes 7 - Orac, the super computer, who can read any computer with "tarial cells" and is therefore able to find any data the characters can possibly want. Whether he then tells them what he finds out is another story.....
- Impulse is the only Flash able to permanently remember what he reads at super-speed. Once, he read an entire San Francisco public library. It came in less handy than you'd think.
- The Doctor is a living Magical Database. This troper can't remember a single episode in the new or old series where he met an alien, visited a planet, or saw a piece of technology he hadn't seen, invented, or met previously. In the new series, when a bunch of alien cops threaten him and Donna in a language not even the mighty TARDIS can translate he easily understands and berates them in the same language. The man is awesome. But then who knows what anybody might know after traveling the universe for a thousand years...
- And then there's CAL, which contains every book ever written in any language, by any species, since the beginning of time. Including lost works. In both hard copy and digital.
- Primeval Within less than 15 minutes into the pilot, we've seen that a college student has put together an entire database on every known prehistoric animal.
- Subverted in Mr And Mrs Smith : When the female titular character commands her subordinates to "search the database!", she gets rebutted with a snarky "For what? John Smith?"
- Wade from Kim Possible has more or less everything in the database, which of course comes in handy very often. Somewhat justified that he is a highly skilled hacker using Rapid Typing with his Magical Computer.
- Chuck is a walking-talking database, able to identify terrorists on sight, however there is also such a database under the Orange Orange used by Sarah and Casey. In Chuck vs. Santa Claus we see it pulls up the record of "Ned" who has no criminal record, and is listed as having never been married or divorced. You know how powerful a computer is when it categorizes you by things you haven't done rather than by what you have done. Then again, it is a U.S. government computer...
- Trope Bot is.
- The titular character of To Aru Majutsu No Index is quite literally one of these considering the database itself is about magic.
- Ziggy from Quantum Leap not only apparently has records of the minutiae of decades' worth of the day-to-day activities of pretty much everyone who was alive at the same time as Sam Beckett, but can also calculate the probability that Sam's interference in history will have the desired effect.
- This very wiki! Theoretically, you could write any genre of fiction story for any medium if all you had was this trope and some time to spare.
- The titular book of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy may be a subversion of this, as it contains data on almost everything in existance but a good deal of that data is either made up on a whim or wildly inaccurate.
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