Basic concepts of databases

• Word processed documents organize the data (mostly text) in paragraphs and sentences;
• Spreadsheet documents organize the data (mostly numbers) in rows and columns;
• Databases organize the data (of all kinds) into records and fields.

Base database terminology

A Base database is able to contain thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of records, depending on the purpose for which the database has been designed. A teacher may have dozens of records in his or her class databases; a school district may well have hundreds or thousands of records to collect and maintain; a company like GM will have hundreds of thousands, maybe even
millions of records in multiple databases containing information about employees, products and other kinds of data going back decades; a US government office, such as the IRS, will surely have databases with millions of records.
Maintaining masses of data such as this is hard. Actually, maintaining even small amounts of data is hard, so it’s not surprising that the computer has been brought to the rescue of those of us who need to manage data.

To avoid a hodge-podge of data organized at random, people have come up with the idea of organizing data into records. Records contain fields. Each field contains entries made up of text and numbers, which are the basic building blocks of data.
For example, let us say you have given your students an assignment to study birds and they must build a database to store the data collected. Each student decides to set up a record for every bird sighted.

Each record will include several field names, such as Common Name of the bird, Type (Family) of the bird, Size of the bird, Habitat, etc. A field name such as Common Name, for example, might contain the entry "Seagull" or “Red Ibis.”
A database thus contains records; records have fields; the fields contain entries.

These entries are made accessible by the Table, Form, and Report functions of the Base database. At the end of a school year, for example, a student would be able to use the word processor (Writer) to write a relatively sophisticated paper, and merge into the paper some of the data collected in the database of Birds information. The student might well also add illustrations of the birds.

ESSENTIAL LibreOffice
Tutorials for Teachers
by
Bernard John Poole