FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual

Relational Databases Explained

Before you dive head first into relational databases, it will be helpful to review some vocabulary. First, a database is a collection of tables, layouts, and other things that forms an organized system. A table holds information about one kind of thing, like people, orders, products, or suppliers. A field holds one attribute of something: the person’s first name, the order date, the color of a product, or the supplier’s address. (An attribute simply means an individual characteristic. For example, a bicycle might have several attributes: color, height, style, and price. In a database, each of these attributes gets its own field.)

In the previous chapters, you’ve created a database whose tables and fields track various attributes of people. You could repeat the process and build any number of individual databases for organizing your time, creating invoices, and logging payments. But that approach has real problems, like the following:

• When you log some billable work, you have to type in the customer information. Then, when you create an invoice, you have to type the customer information all over again in the invoice file. When you receive a payment, you have to type it a third time in the payment file. Since the databases aren’t connected in any way, they can’t share that information with one another.

• Suppose you want to see how much you’ve billed a customer over the years. You could use the Invoices database and run a summary report by, say, the customer’s ...