It's difficult to be pedantic about an ambiguous term like database without additional qualification or specificity. There are more types of databases than tho

It's difficult to be pedantic about an ambiguous term like database without additional qualification or specificity. There are more types of databases than those that end in "SQL". A CSV file alone is a database. The rows are, well, rows. So is a DBM file, which is what MySQL was originally built on (might still be). Or an SQLite file. The client or server API doesn't have to be part of the database itself.