Database Primer

A database is a collection of related information, or data. Some common examples of databases include recipe books, medical records, telephone books, mailing lists, dictionaries, card catalogues, inventory lists, sales orders, personnel records, or national population statistics.

A common database such as a paper based telephone directory has a number of drawbacks:

• Looking up a person's number can be slow in a large directory.
• Finding the names of people living at a particular address could take forever as the directory is not indexed on the address.
• The paper copy is soon out of date as changes occur, people move house or change their phone numbers.

By contrast, electronic databases manage large collections of information easily.

Microsoft Access is an electronic relational database-management system for Windows. It enables you to electronically store, organise, and manipulate collections of information:

• Sorting: You can rearrange information in different ways (alphabetic or numeric order, and so on). For example, a sorted employee list from a company’s personnel database might show all employees according to their start date.
• Extracting: You can extract specific information and view it, work with it, or print it. For example, from a company’s stock database, you might want to extract a list of products and their prices for one product category.
• Summarizing: You can manipulate and summarise information. For example, from a company’s sales database, you might want to report sales totals, grouped by product, with totals and averages for each department and for the entire company.

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For Access training see our course outlines.

For SQL training see our course outlines.