FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual

Tables and Fields

So you’re getting tired of your job, and you decide it would be exciting to get into the private investigator business. You found an office, ordered business cards, secured a phone line, and purchased some snazzy furniture. But have you thought about how you’re going to run your business? Chances are, you could use some help from a database. And the first thing you need to think about when building a database is what kind of information it’s going to track. For example, a private investigator may want to keep track of people—names, phone numbers, aliases, passport numbers, and so on. Someone in retail, however, may want to track inventory—product names, descriptions, item numbers, prices, quantities, and similar details.

Tables: The Foundation of Your Database

You already know that whatever information you put in your database goes into fields—and that’s where your database building begins. These fields in turn comprise a table. Tables are at the heart of the database, holding all the information and keeping it organized. Everything else in a database works in service of the tables in some way, letting you edit, extract, or view the information.

Conceptually, a table has rows and columns. The fields you create become the columns in the table. As you add records, you add new rows to the table. It’s called a table because it stores information in a tabular form, just like the table of values in the back of a college math book. When you first start out with FileMaker, ...