Introduction to Database Software
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| FileMaker Pro is database software. If you need to keep track of more than one of anything, you could probably benefit from using a database. Databases are useful for keeping track of contacts and their addresses and phone numbers , the students in a school, the sales and inventory in a store, or the results of experimental trials. You can also keep that kind of information in a word processor or on paper, but a database will make it much easier to
The rest of this book gets into detail on how to do everything just mentioned and much more as well. You'll get a more detailed look at what a database is and how it works, but first let's consider how a database product such as FileMaker Pro fits into the universe of software products. Types of Database SoftwareA huge variety of software is on the market today. At the top level are broad software categories such as games , multimedia, and educational software. The category that FileMaker generally fits into is business productivity software. We say " generally " because lots of people use FileMaker for non-business activities such as managing wedding invitation lists or keeping track of their hobbies or collections. The idea of managing a collection of something is what database software is all about. Some database products on the market manage specialized collections such as business contacts. Products such as Act or Goldmine are good examples of those. Quicken, QuickBooks, and Microsoft Money manage collections of financial transactions. FileMaker and other non-specialized database products such as Microsoft Access are used to create database systems just as word processing software is used to create specific documents and Microsoft Excel is used to create spreadsheets. In fact, Microsoft Excel is often used as a database because it has several strong list management features. It works well for managing simple databases, but doesn't work well in managing multiple lists that are related to each other. A quick example of two lists that are related to each other is a list of companies and a list of contacts at those companies. If you were to keep these two lists as a single list, the company information would have to be repeated for each employee that worked at the company. That doesn't sound like a big deal, and it isn't for small databases, but suppose the list contained dozens of contacts for each company. If a company name or address ever changed (which happens) you would have to find each contact for that company and update the name or address information over and over again. There are other problems with this kind of a simple list structure, or flat file , but we'll get into those later in the book. Off-the-Shelf SoftwareFor now, let's stay with the idea of a collection of collections, or multiple lists that have some relationship to other lists, like employees to companies. This idea of relatedness is why you may have heard the term relational database . There are many relational database products on the market, and FileMaker Pro is one of them. Specialized products such as Act or Quicken are also relational database products, but the difference is that those products are finished systems, whereas products such as FileMaker are used to create such systems. If you wanted to, you could re-create the functionality in Act or Quicken by using FileMaker, and some people do. They do so because the problem with specialized products is that they're relatively inflexible . If your organization has some non-standard ways of doing things, you may find it difficult to work with these specialized products. Another term for these products, by the way, is off-the-shelf software , which just means that they're ready to use right off the shelf. That contrasts with database authoring tools such as FileMaker Pro. Although FileMaker Pro does come with several database templates that might be perfectly suitable for you to use off the shelf, most people instead use FileMaker Pro to create a custom database system that exactly matches how their organization operates. Custom Development SoftwareIdeally, a database system should work exactly as your organization does, and your organization should not have to adapt its procedures to work with the database system. It should be the other way around, with the database system adapting to fit the needs of an organization. That's the drawback of off-the-shelf software. Except for some limited customization features, you don't have the ability to make major changes to its functionality. With custom development database software such as FileMaker Pro, you can build a system to be exactly what you need. It's the difference between buying a house that is a pretty good match for you and having a custom home built that has all the features that you want (or at least can afford). Building a house is actually a great analogy for building a database, because they follow similar trajectories. You need to design your database before you build it. You need to wait for it to be built before you can move in, and questions or issues often arise during the construction process. After it's built, your needs may change and you may need to make an addition to accommodate your changed circumstances. This last point is an important one, because business environment changes and resulting organizational changes happen much more rapidly than in years past. One of the key advantages to developing database systems in FileMaker Pro is that it can be rapidly redesigned, even while the system is in use by other users. You can change any aspect of the system while it's "live" if need be, although that may not always be advisable. This was true in previous versions of FileMaker, but that flexibility is even greater with FileMaker Pro 7. In FileMaker Pro 7, you can make changes to field definitions and security settings even while users are logged in to the system. What Database Software DoesNow that we've taken a general look at different types of database software, let's circle back to the functionality of database software. We'll start with the concept of a collection ”a list. The simplest kind of database is a list. It could be a list of employees or products or soccer teams . Consider an employee example. The information that you want to keep track of might look the table shown in Table 1.1. Table 1.1. Employee Table
In database parlance, a list like this is called a table . Many database systems start off like this. Someone got organized and gathered information into one place. As soon as other people notice this, the idea gets extended, and soon the table grows to keep track of other phone numbers as well. The result is shown in Table 1.2. Table 1.2. The Growing Phone Directory
As mentioned earlier, this type of database is called a flat file database because everything is in one table. Although it's nice to have everything in one place, this kind of structure has shortcomings. In this case, every time someone thinks up a new type of phone number to track, another field needs to get added to the table. If someone doesn't have a particular type of phone number, that field is blank, resulting in a Swiss cheese look to the table. Unused fields take up space in the database and slow things down for larger data sets. In a relational structure (which is the opposite of flat file), only the first three columns would be in the employee table. The last three columns , which are all essentially just phone numbers, would be moved out to their own table. A label field could be added to identify each type of phone number, with the resulting two tables looking something like those shown in Tables 1.3 and 1.4. Table 1.3. The Revised Employee Table
Table 1.4. The New Phone Table
Note than an additional field has been added: an Employee ID field. This field is used to match up the employees with the phone numbers for each employee, and in relational database terminology, it's called a key field . The FileMaker Pro help system refers it as a match field, but they are one and the same. Key fields are used to locate specific records. You'll learn more about key fields later in the book, but for now it's enough to know that key fields are used to link records in different tables. Although FileMaker Pro can be used to build simple flat file database systems (see Figure 1.1), it really shines at creating relational database systems (see Figure 1.2). Other database products can do this as well, but FileMaker Pro stands alone in the speed and elegance with which you can create such systems. It is truly a rapid application development (RAD) tool. Figure 1.1. FileMaker can be used to construct simple flat-file databases. Figure 1.2. The two-table Employee/Phone example can look something like this when implemented in FileMaker. |
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