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"Most relational databases are designed for large corporations that employ an army of programmers and administrators. In the more modest small office world, who has the time or the resources to tap into such technology? The answer to that question for many businesses would have to be FileMaker Pro." Home Office Computing

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What is a Relational Database?

(vs. a Flat File Database)

Designing a flat file database is a relatively straightforward procedure. Since you can't share information between files in a true flat file database, everything you want to track in your database needs to have a field defined for it. For example, if you have a file named Invoices and you want to include customer information, you need to define fields for customer name, address, city, state, and zip code in addition to the fields you already defined in the Invoices file. If you want to include product information, you need to define fields for product name, color, size (or other attributes), and price in addition to the fields you have already defined. As you can see, your flat file database can contain a large number of fields and in many cases a lot of duplicate data, such as customer or product names. Designing a flat file database is simply a matter of deciding what data you want to track and creating a field for each piece of data.

Next, you will need to consider how to transfer information from one database to the other. Data will then have to be copied and pasted from the Customers file into the Invoices file based on a matching value in a field contained in both files. If you change the data in the Customers file, it doesn't automatically change the data in the Invoices file. In order to update any changes, you must transfer or cut and paste. So if a customer changes their address, you would have to update all occurrences of that customer's address. If you change the customer data in the Invoices file, there is no easy way to update the data in the lookup file. Flat file databases are good for keeping information on a single subject, names and addresses for example. When you need to view and work with data in several files, you need to use a relational database.

In contrast to flat-file databases, relational databases store data in many files, using relationships between the files to bring the data together on one form or layout. Designing a relational database takes careful planning ahead of time. Designing a relational database takes a lot of planning up front before you even create your first file and define your first field. Planning ahead will save time and effort later on and will result in fewer changes to be made later.

The first step in creating an entity relationship diagram is to decide which categories, or entities, of information you'll be working with. Keeping with our invoice scenario, are the entities products, vendors, salespeople, employees, customers, invoices, all of these or a combination? Once you have identified the entities, you then identify the relationships between the entities. Which entities are related to other entities? After writing down the entities, draw lines from one entity to another to indicate a relationship between the entities.

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