Good morning, maybe it can be a fairly trivial question, but the reality is that many people use it indifferently and I would like to know if they refer to exactly the same, or if there is a technical difference.
As far as I understand, both are part of a database management system.
Thanks in advance.
It is called the engine, the tools that allow to communicate with the database, execute the processes on the tables and maintain the integrity of the data. The engine is the one that interprets and executes the queries, maintains the indices, among many other things.
Per server, in general it means the physical environment (the hardware) where a database engine resides. However, as in general in large places the machines that host databases, only have the database engine, so that is why it is used interchangeably.
However, you could calmly have a database engine installed on your PC, and in turn serve other PCs, so your PC would also be the database server.