From the course: FileMaker Pro Essential Training

What is a database? - FileMaker Pro Tutorial

From the course: FileMaker Pro Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

What is a database?

“

- [Instructor] Before working with a database, it's important to understand what a database actually is. The definition of a database is the collection of like information with underlining attributes. And I'm sure you're already familiar with databases and you might not even know it. You've probably seen databases in the form of things like address books on your computer, where one record equals one individual whose information you're trying to store. And in this case, the like information that you're storing would be different individuals, in different context with underlining attributes like first and last name, company name, Home page, notes, that type of thing. And you're probably already familiar with databases from your Web experiences. For example, LinkedIn Learning is just a huge database system, it's a database of all sorts of different courses that you can watch online. The role of a database is two-fold. So the first role is actually storing the data, so a database at its core is really just meant to be a repository where you can put all your information in, so that it's easy for you to retrieve later. But in addition to storing the data, it also contains good information on how to identify the data within the storage mechanism. A good example of this would be a spreadsheet. So for example in this spreadsheet, we see that this one stores individuals, or customers, and each piece of information that's stored in this spreadsheet is an attribute. For example, FirstName, LastName, StartDate, Title, and so on, these are all attributes of a customer or a person. You'll also notice that when you look at a spreadsheet, the information is organized in columns and rows. You'll see columns for FirstName, LastName, StartDate, and so on, and how the spreadsheet itself stores the data, so as I move the spreadsheet around, the data will travel along with it, and that's how it works as a storage mechanism. But in addition to that, it also explains, or describes the information that's contained within it. You'll see that the first row is really just the description of the data that's been stored in each of the following rows. We can tell this intuitively by looking at a spreadsheet, that Curly and Lambeau is in fact the first name and last name, because it comes under the First and Last columns. When it comes to FileMaker databases, the rows are actually represented as records, and that's the terminology that I'mna use throughout the rest of this course. So then a record is a grouping of a bunch of different pieces of information, or attributes, that all describe one instance of the information that's being managed. So in this case, this iteration or instance, is a customer, and all these different pieces of information describe one of the customers. So Curly Lambeau, with a StartDate and a Title and a Status and so on, describes one instance of a customer. These columns in FileMaker are referred to as fields, that's how we describe attributes. Each piece of data describes one of the records. At any intersection, for example, FirstName and the first row, we see the word Curly, that's the data that gets stored inside of a field inside of a record in our FileMaker database. So hopefully a little background and some terminology on FileMaker databases, maybe some stuff that you're already familiar with, will help you understand the concepts that will be discussed later in this course.

Contents