Chapter 8
Working with Databases
This chapter begins looking at databases in detail. Chapter 7 showed you some of the basics, and this chapter takes the next step. In this chapter, you begin working with multiple databases. Two common tasks are adding two databases together so that you can analyze the result as a single database and comparing the content of two databases. This second form is a kind of analysis that helps you locate anomalies—the kind of information that an audit commonly requires as a starting point. Database comparison can be time consuming, so it's an especially appropriate task for IDEAScript.
The next step is to start looking for errors in databases. In this case, you begin working with keys—the fields of a database that define the uniqueness of each record. Again, this kind of analysis points out anomalies that you need to consider during an audit. Even more important, these checks can point out database errors that could hinder other kinds of analysis that you need to perform later.
This chapter also introduces you to exporting the database. You can export databases for a number of reasons. For example, you might want to share the details of an analysis with a colleague. In some cases, you simply need the data in another format to create reports and perform additional analysis. Whatever the reason for exporting the data, IDEAScript supports a number of convenient export formats you can use.
Finally, you'll find more details on using fields, records, and ...
