Databases, records and fields

A database is a store of information. The database may contain information about people or products or services, or in fact just about anything. For the sake of having an example to focus on, let's consider a database containing information about people.

Within a database the information is probably organised in some way. In the case of dLabel databases the information is organised into records. To illustrate this using our example of a database containing information about people, the database may contain the information organised into records using one record per person. So if the database contains information about a thousand people the database would contain 1000 records.

A record may be regarded as a sheet of paper on which the information about each individual person has been written. In this case the database could be viewed as a drawer full of the sheets of paper. dLabel enables you to find specific sheets of paper - no matter what the order of the sheets in the drawer.

On a specific sheet of paper the information about one person is probably organised in some way as well. For example the sheet may contain the person's name, address, telephone number, year of birth, and so on. Each of these items of information about the person can be referred to as a field. So there may be a field for the person's name, a second field for the address, a third for the telephone number, etc. In most cases the first should contain the information which is most commonly used to identify the record - such as the person’s name.

It is easy to imagine the many ways in which the sheets of paper representing the individual records could be organised. For example, they could be arranged in alphabetical order of the person's name. Or they could be arranged by age order, or by telephone number, or area of residence. While alphabetical order may sound like a good idea, it is not necessarily the best way if one wishes to extract specifically the records of persons living in London, or persons aged between 20 and 25.

dLabel permits the records in a database to be rearranged into alphabetical or numerical ascending or descending order for any specified field of information contained in a record.

More:

Creating a database