Subtitles of the Movie

You may be surprised to find out that you're already using a database. Because databases are prevalent in our society. Anyone with a computer is using a database. That's because your system software is essentially a database. It allows you to organize your files into folders. If you're using accounting software, same thing, you're able to organize all of these entries that you make regarding your business. Web engines like Google, they keep track of the web, they go out and send out spiders who check out the web and they pull back the information and put it into records in a database. Even your e-mail client is a database and I use it often as a to-do list. I have all my e-mails and it's my to-do list but it allows you to organize your e-mails into folders. Even an ATM, an Automated Teller Machine is a database. It keeps a track of all of the accounts that are there and allows you to display them to the people that are coming in to use that ATM. So databases are everywhere, you'll be surprised when you start thinking about organizing, when you start organizing data that really is a database. So essentially anything that can be searched and sorted is a database. And we'll find out more about what searching and sorting is but sorting is essentially putting things in alphabetical order and searching is saying grab these marbles. Let's say you had a, a hand full of marbles. I want to find the red marbles, now I want to find the green marbles, or maybe I want to find all the large marbles or just the small ones. Or maybe I want to organize them by design. Anyway you can look at that marble and organize it in your mind and separate them, that's what searching is. It's separating them into different piles. Another good analogy is a filing cabinet. Think of a filing cabinet, your putting things in folders, that's all a database is. In fact to logo for FileMaker Incorporated used to be a filing cabinet. Another analogy I really like to use is that of an old fashioned Rolodex. You know those ones that have the cards that are stuck on the ring. Well those Rolodexes, those old fashioned rolodexs are a database. It allows you to pull out just the names ending in O if you want. You could arrange your Rolodex items alphabetically; you could remove one and throw it in the trash if you want. Or you could even go through and copy all the names you wanted on a contact list and these would be all the people you want to invite to a party. It's up to you how you work with your Rolodex. The only difference with a database is that it's much more sophisticated. In fact you don't have to re-do all this work. If you want to create a, a contact list you simply find all the people you want and print it. You don't have to copy it to another contact sheet. So it makes things much easier. So as we're going through all these tutorials if you're new to databases, very new to them and don't understand them, just keep thinking of the rolodex, it's the perfect example of a database. Of course a database can do much more but that'll give you a good foundation of knowledge for it. So a database organizes and manipulates records. It's very important sentence to understand. And kind of what we've been saying already but let's say it again, it organizes and manipulates records. So what is a record? A record could be one recipe in a recipe database cause you'll have many records representing all your recipes. It could be one employee in a database that tracks employees for your company. It could be 1 company and a database that tracks companies. It could be 1 product or 1 invoice; the list goes on and on. Essentially, a database organizes those records or like the cards in a Rolodex. Keep thinking of record is equal to that Rolodex card. Now on each one of those records you have things that describe that record. Those are called fields. So a recipe record would have an ingredient field where you'd fill in the ingredients and that would describe that recipe. An employee or a company record would have an address field; in fact they might have a city and state and phone number and all that kind of good stuff. And in each one of those fields, on each one of those records you'll fill in different address and a different city, state and zip. Of course some companies will have the same city and state and things like that but you get the idea. The field describes the record; it's the way that you describe somebody. Think of a person, you know if you look at this person you could think about them, they have straight hair and blue eyes and tan skin and whatever you wanted to describe them as, those would be the fields. The record would be the person. So let's go on with this, a field could be a name. You might want to name your product inside your product database or you might want to put an invoice date on an invoice. These are all fields that describe that record.