A database is made up of a series of records. Each record can be thought of as a snapshot of a particular set
of details. The details are known as fields, and each field contains pertinent information or data. A single
database record can be made up of any number of fields of varying types??”some fields hold only numbers
or only dates, whereas others are open-ended and can hold any type of information. A series of database
records that have the same fields is commonly referred to as a table??”a simple table is also known as a flatfile
database. Like a word-processing or HTML table, a database table has rows and columns. Each column
represents a field, and each row represents a record. For example, the following table called BookTitles
describes a series of books.
Title Author Pages Published
JavaScript Bible Danny Goodman 1,248 2004
CSS Hacks and Filters Joseph Lowery 266 2005
Fireworks MX Bible Joseph Lowery and Derren Whiteman 1,016 2002
The first row in the table contains the field names: Title, Author, Pages, and Published. Each subsequent
row contains a complete record. This table is in no particular order; however, one of the reasons why databases
are so powerful is their sorting capability. If you were to sort the BookTitles table by page count,
listing the books with the fewest pages first, it would look like the following table.
Pages:
1113
1114
1115
1116
1117
1118
1119
1120
1121
1122
1123
1124
1125
1126
1127
1128
1129
1130
1131
1132
1133
1134
1135
1136
1137