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

Dan,
Chapter 2??  All I have is Chapter 1 - "Introducing Base" and Chapter 8 
- "Getting Started with Base". 
I see there is a draft copy of Chapter 2 and 3 now.  I will read them.
Thanks.
Girvin Herr



Dan Lewis wrote:
> 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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