What is a database?

- [Instructor] Before we begin working with FileMaker, it's important to understand what a database actually is. Now, the definition of a database is a collection of like information with underlying attributes. You're probably already familiar with databases, and you may not even know it. You've probably seen databases in the form of things like contacts 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 a different context, and the underlying attributes are actually things like phone numbers, email, instant message, address, street address, and that type of thing.

You're always probably familiar with databases from your web experiences. For example, Lynda.com is just a huge database system. It allows you to search on courses. So what are the roles of a database? The roles are actually twofold. So first, the database actually stores the data. This way all of your data lives together in one place. But in addition to storing the data, it also contains information on how to identify the data, along with the storage mechanism. You're probably somewhat familiar with this if you've used desktop databases, or things like spreadsheets.

Let's take a look at a spreadsheet here. We see that in this case, this spreadsheet is storing individuals, or let's call them customers, where each piece of information that's stored in the spreadsheet is an attribute. For example, you see we have different attributes like, first name, last name, and start date. These are all things that we call attributes of a customer. You'll also notice that when we look at the spreadsheet, the information's not only just organizing columns, but also in rows. Each row represents an iteration of what we're storing in this spreadsheet. So what we're looking at are examples of a place where we can store data, we see that we've got four different records of customer information that we're storing, but then the columns, like first name, last name, and start date actually describe what the data is that's being stored.

So, we accomplish both of those things in a spreadsheet. Now as we move forward talking about FileMaker, our nomenclature changes just a bit. So instead of rows, like you see here with row two, we call those records in FileMaker. And instead of these columns, or attributes, we call those fields in FileMaker. And we'll expand upon both of those topics as we move forward in this course. Now although both FileMaker and spreadsheets have these same types of roles in common, you'll see that FileMaker has some very distinct advantages over storing your data in spreadsheets that we'll evaluate in the next movie.