Subtitles of the Movie

[00:00:00.0] You maybe surprised to find out that you're using databases in your everyday life. So let's define what a database is by telling you where you've been using it. In fact if you have a computer which I know you do, you've been using a database ever since you turned on that computer. Because your system software, the thing that controls, is the brains of your computer, which organizes all your files into folders and onto different volumes, that is a database. You can find in it, you can sort those lists, you can work with all those organized files, and that really is a database, the essential definition of a database. If you work with accounting software, well accounting software keeps track of your transactions. You have one record, which is an essential piece of a database, one record for each transaction, so it tracks those. And you can print out reports on those transactions, you can find a certain transaction. These are all things that make up a database. Anything that organizes your information, that is a database. Web search engines like Google, well, that's a database, it's a database of what's on the Internet. So you can search and it'll bring up a hit list, just like FileMaker can do with a List View, you can see all the things that you've found. And then each one of those hits on Google is like a record in FileMaker. And so while your records may be different, they're essentially the same thing. You may have people, or companies, or invoices, or products in your table; Google simply has a table of all the information on the Internet and each record is a different website. Even your email client that you use every day is a database. In fact, I overuse mine as a database, I use it as a to-do list and have everything in there and sometimes forget to transfer it and end up abusing what an email is and I have thousands of emails in there. But it essentially organizes everything for you into different folders, each record is an email. And so you can print out a whole bunch of those emails or you can put them over in this folder, and you can sort them - that's a database. And you may be surprised to learn that an automatic teller machine is also a database. It keeps track of all the customers at the bank, you need to log in, find your accounts, withdraw money, it's all controlled by a database that stores all the people and all their accounts and all their money. And so it really is a database as well. So anything that can be searched and sorted is essentially a database. They're all over the place, you'll be surprised, you'll start noticing that, hey, that's a database, I can't believe it is. And so they're prevalent in our society, what we're going to do is explore how to create your own database inside of FileMaker. It's a very exciting moment right now. So let's take an analogy of a Rolodex, think of a database as one of those Rolodex of phone numbers, you know, where they have the cards that are all attached to the ring, and you can flip through them, they're all alphabetical? Well that is essentially what a database is, a database can do a lot more, but for right now, think of a database as a Rolodex, you can flip through those names, find the one you want, you can arrange them alphabetically, you can take one of the cards out of the Rolodex and throw it in the trash because it's no longer needed, you can copy a bunch of Rolodex entries onto a single contact sheet if you want to, for instance, send out a mailing or something. Maybe you want to write down everybody's address and take it to work or something, I mean, it's much less efficient than a database because a database can do all this without having to redo anything, copy information down or throw away - but it essentially is the same thing as a database, so keep thinking that when you're trying to grasp what a database is. So a database organizes and manipulates records. A record could be one recipe, it could be one employee, it could be one company, one product, one invoice. You want to think of a database as organizing all these like elements together, and so if you have a database of your CD collection, you probably have hundreds of CD's, well, each record is going to be one CD, and there'd probably be another table that's connected to that which would show all the songs, but let's not get too complicated, let's keep it simple. Now let's say you just wanted to know each CD you had. Well, you'd have, you know, all these records in there and you could go ahead and manipulate them by finding, or sorting, or printing, and that's what a database can do, it can allow you to take these records and manipulate them. You might change them, you might find them, you might sort them, all kinds of things can be done. Now, on a record you have a field. That describes that record. So in the case or a recipe record, a field could be an ingredient, in the case of an employee or a company, it could be an address, one of the fields could be city, state, zip, any of those fields. In the case of a product, well you could have a product name, that could be one of the fields. But as far as an invoice, you might have a date that you invoice that set of products, so these fields are attributes of that record. So again, we repeated this over and over again, what you can do with those records, and that's the basis of what you're working with, you can rearrange those. Think of marbles. If you had a whole bunch of marbles, you could organize them into piles by colors, or into piles by size, or into piles by design. However you want to organize them you can, and that's what a database can do, it can take this big set of records and say, this record goes over here, and this record goes over in this other place. And so by doing that, you really can organize things so that works well, that's really the way the brain works and that's why I love databases so much. It's about organizing things.