Quote:
Secure locate provides a secure way to index and quickly search for files on your system. It uses incremental encoding just like GNU locate to compress its database to make searching faster, but it will also check file permissions and ownership so that users will not see files they do not have access to.
. The DB is the data base source - you can point from where to start, via -U and -u switches. Look at the man pages for your distro.
Basically you're saying : Here's my hard drive, crawl all over it, and store the results in data base format, with indexes, relations, etc. This makes search [locate] much faster than the traditional "find" for example. slocate is the secure version of "locate", you also might want to look at its man pages.