Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: LO 4.0: intrinsic database: relations only between primaries keys?

Have you read Chapter 2 of the Base Guide? (Planning/Designing your 
database) There are 56 pages in which I used this approach for all the 
parts of a database. There are many questions in it designed to help a 
person.

--Dan

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications

On 02/14/2013 07:39 PM, Girvin R. Herr wrote:
> Dan,
> This is good!  It is a good start on an introduction to databases for 
> newbies.
> It should be put in the Base manual?
> Girvin Herr
>
> Dan Lewis wrote:
> <snip>
> >       Some basics about creating a database:
> > 1) You begin with data that you want to use for some purpose or 
> > purposes.
> > 2) Then you design the database to organize this data so that it will 
> > be useful.
> >
> > For example: an address database:
> >      In the beginning, the database consists of information such as 
> > names, addresses, email address, phone numbers, etc.
> >      The first thing you would want to do is to organize this data so 
> > that a name is linked to its address, its email address, its phone 
> > numbers, etc. Now you have rows of data, each one of them containing 
> > information about a single person (a relationship exists between the 
> > data for each row). Each of these pieces of information is a field.
> >      If you look at these rows, you will see that they also contain 
> > some things in common. Several rows can contain data about your 
> > friends, others are about your relatives, and others are about 
> > companies you do business with. You probably know of other 
> > possibilities. So, these rows can be organized into groups based upon 
> > what they have in common. (This too is a relationship.)
> >      The next thing you should do is to further organize these rows 
> > in each one of these groups to make them more useful. You could form 
> > a table using these as the column headings: name, address, email 
> > address, and phone number. ( Now you have a table for each group of 
> > rows. So, if you want data about a particular contact, you can go to 
> > the table that contains it. If you want to look at the data for a 
> > relative, you go to the table containing all of your relatives.
> >      This is basically how a flat database is created. Relational 
> > databases begin in the same way.
> >      At this point, each of these tables are checked to see whether 
> > they are "normal" or not. For example, a contact is likely to have 
> > multiple phone numbers or other possible multiple entries. Each of 
> > these have something in common (another relationship). We can remove 
> > the field containing multiple entries forming a new table. To keep 
> > the relationship between this new table with the original table, we 
> > create a primary-foreign key pair (the primary key is for the new 
> > table, and the foreign key is added to the original table in place of 
> > the fields we removed.) This is what is done to make a table "first 
> > normal form".
> >      There are several levels of a table being normal: "first normal 
> > form" to "fourth normal form" and beyond. "Fourth normal form" is 
> > considered to be the standard against which a table should be judged.
> >      The point being that we do not create tables with their fields 
> > and then define the relationship between them. We begin the the 
> > fields that we know we will need, combine the fields based upon 
> > relationships between data, and combine the fields into tables based 
> > upon relationships between the fields. The the tables are normalized 
> > up to "fourth normal form" creating new tables and modifying the old 
> > ones. Primary-foreign key pairs are used to define the relationship 
> > of the new tables and the modified old table from which the new table 
> > came.
> >      Hopefully this will help some.
> >
> > --Dan


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