What is a database?

Before working with a database it's important to first understand what a database actually is. By definition a database is the collection of like information with common underlying attributes. You are actually already familiar with the concept of a database, and you might not even know it. For example, you've probably seen databases in the form of things like address books on your computer where one record in the database 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, and those types of things.

Every one of the contacts will all have information or potentially have information for those. So you want to create an area where you can store all of that when necessary. You're probably also familiar with databases from your web experiences. For example, lynda.com is a huge database that stores all the different links to all the different movies you might want to watch, and you can go on and search that database by telling it what author you might be interested in or what type of application you're interested in, and it will direct you to the location of those movies. The role of a database is twofold.

First, the database physically stores the data along with the database files so that all the data lives together in one place. But in addition to storing the data, it also contains information on how to identify the data within the storage mechanism. A good example of this is a spreadsheet. If we take a look at the spreadsheet here you will see that this one stores information on individuals. You'll also notice that when you look at the spreadsheet the information is organized into columns and rows, each column represents a different attribute about one of these individuals, each row represents a different iteration of the data that we are sorting.

So you see, for example, we have columns for First, Name, Last Name, Start Date, Title, and Status, and then in this second row we see that we've got a different piece of information in each one of those cells wherever a row and a column intersect. But in FileMaker databases the rows are actually represented as something called a record, and that's the terminology that I am going to use throughout the rest of this title. 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 that one instance in a spreadsheet is represented as a row, and in FileMaker we call that a record. And in a spreadsheet an attribute of one of these rows is represented as a column, but in FileMaker we call these Fields. At any intersection we will see here that Pamela has a last name of Dreyfus. So in that case in FileMaker database we are going to be storing that information inside of a field. So hopefully a little background on databases that you might already be familiar with will help you understand the concepts that we are going to discuss as we move along in this title.