What Is a Database Used For?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you what a database is used for. Databases are really good for storing vast amounts of data whether it be lists of users in a huge organization and their addresses, all the way down to something a whole lot smaller like your home album collection. I'm going to show you here a simple example of a database and what you can use it for. Let's open up Microsoft Access here which is a good, easy to use database solution. I'm going to enable the content within this database I have open. What Microsoft Access does as well as most database applications is allow you to create tables that store a list of data. This example I have open right here is a student list and as you can see, it maintains information about all of the students who might be in a school. Their first name, their last name, address, information like that. This is one of the better uses I would say for a database because a student list can be as many as 80 students or it could be like a university, something like 25,000 students and you can just type in information directly into this. It has a very Excel-like interface. And you just give some information here about your student as well as e-mail address, company, title and whatnot. I think this one's more geared towards students at a university who would be working somewhere while they're going to school. Now that is one table that's used in here. This right here is an example of a report. Now this report will show you the list of students from the student list. Reports allow you to take the information in a database and just show it in a more legible form that you can actually print out. Access has it built-in that you can view data from your tables in a report format that's easy to print. There's a lot of information and here's some different reports that will be run in this particular, this particular student application. Now you can also create multiple tables. The one I've been working on was students, this one right here could be guardians and you can input information about all the guardians for any students that you might have as well as view a report on those as well. Another thing that you can do within a database is run what are called a queries where you would select specific information like say you only want a list of the first name of all the students at a university and it will just return their first name. That's what databases are used for."