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Tom’s Tech-Notes

Personal Computer Databases, An Overview

By Tom Burt, Editor, Sun City Summerlin Computer Club, NV

May 2018 issue, The Gigabytes Gazette
www.scscc.club/

tomburt89134 (at) cox.net
Introduction

I’ve spent much of my career in software development working with various database programs,
including a stint at Ashton-Tate / Borland as Director of the dBase development team. For this
month’s Tech Notes discussion, we’ll do an overview of what database technology is available
for regular personal computer users. Interestingly, some of the best database programs are free.
The tradeoff is that you have to invest some time learning how to use them.

The basic idea of a database is that it’s a way to save and organize information so that specific
pieces can be quickly retrieved on demand for either display or computational analysis. The most
common way this is done is to impose some tabular structure (rows and columns) on the data so
that a standardized set of retrieval interfaces can be used. Such databases are referred to as
“relational” databases.

A relational database is comprised of one or more data tables. Each table contains one or more
rows of data. Each row contains one or more columns. Individual columns have a column name,
a size and a data type such as text, integer, float, date or Boolean. One column is commonly
designated the primary key and contains a unique value that can be used to identify and refer to
that row in the table.

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