Database consumption (Japanese: データベース消費, romanized: dētabēsu shōhi) refers to a way of content consumption in which people do not consume a narrative itself, but rather consume the constituent elements of the narrative. The concept was coined by the Japanese critic Hiroki Azuma in the early 2000s.

The background to Azuma's presentation of this theory is the concept of narrative consumption by the critic and writer Eiji Ōtsuka.

In his A Theory of Narrative Consumption, Ōtsuka cites franchises like Bikkuriman stickers and Sylvanian Families as examples, pointing out that people are not consuming the items but the "grand narratives" (大きな物語, 'big story', worldviews and setting) behind them. He called the paradigm of consumption mainly found since the 1980s "narrative consumption". It is also referred to as "worldview consumption" (世界観消費) to avoid the ambiguity of "narrative" which specifically means "grand narrative (worldview and setting)" in this theory.

Based on Ōtsuka's work, Azuma replaces "grand narrative (worldview and setting)" in the theory of narrative consumption with "grand non-narrative (stacks of information)" (大きな非物語（情報の集積）) and use the term "database consumption" to describe the new paradigm of consuming a huge "database" shared within a community. This form of consumption is particularly prominent in Japanese otaku culture since the late 1990s .

The new consumption paradigm is closely related to the advent of postmodernism. In essence, otaku culture and the postmodern condition are thought to have the following points in common: 1) As stated by Jean Baudrillard, it is no longer possible to distinguish between the original and the simulated, and thereby the in-between simulacra prevail in hyperreality, which parallels the difficulty to distinguish derivative works and media mix from the original works in otaku culture; 2) Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as the decline of grand narratives (norms shared by society as a whole) and the emergence of many localized, little narratives (norms shared only within small communities), which corresponds to otaku culture's unique value norm that the fictional world rather than the real world is paid more attention to.

While narrative consumption could be seen as fabricating pseudo-"grand narratives" with worldviews behind works to compensate for the lost grand narrative (partial postmodernism), in database consumption, however, even fabrication is abandoned (full postmodernism). Therefore, in (full) postmodern otaku culture, by accessing the database (stacks of information) that varies depending on personal interpretations, various settings are extracted by different people to create different original and derivative works (indistinguishable between originals and copies).

In Lacanian terminology, "grand narrative" could be seen as "the Symbolic", "little narrative" as "the Imaginary", and the "database" as "the Real". However, psychiatrist Tamaki Saito, while acknowledging such correspondence is understandable as a metaphor, believes the equivalent to the database should be more appropriately the Symbolic, stating that it is the autonomous Symbolic that promotes the "genesis of characters". The "database turn" of the world can be considered a manifestation of postmodernization in the cultural aspect (shift towards database consumption), globalization in the economic aspect, and the digitalization in the technological aspect.

Azuma did not mention which type of database is involved in database consumption. Informatics engineering expert Naohiko Yamaguchi and art critic Takemi Kuresawa believe the concept corresponds to a relational database.