All I know is that it’s a “database management system”, and I don’t even know what that means! I have tried fooling around with Access and have gotten nowhere. Where do I start and what is the purpose of this?
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So if you’ve ever heard of SQL server, this is like a much more compact and barebones version of that.
You can create small databases (collections of information; say a list of houses, their costs per square foot, their square footage, color, etc), and you can create queries in which to search through that data. So with my house example, you can filter out the data by zip code, color, and square footage, and work the math for how much it would cost based on the square footage.
Microsoft Access is an application that helps you to store, update, and maintain data in tables in an Access database.
Many people store data in Excel. While there are certain cases it could be benificial, Excel is aimed at presenting and calculating with data. It is not aimed at simply storing data.
That’s where Access comes in, it provides a way to store this data in a database that is simply accessible by users that are not familiar with SQL type databases. SQL databases (Postgresql, MySQL, MS SQL, MariaDB) all require quite technical setup (you need a server) and good knowledge of the SQL language to interact with them. Access on the other hand is easily installed with MS Office and comes with a UI interface eliminating most of the technical requirements.
Access is not so commonly used (anymore), as many companies will resort to online services providing the same or more specific applied data storage that suits the company’s need. For example the HR department will use an HR management system to store and manage their employees data , and a (web)store will use a stock management application or online webshop catalog to do their stock and product management.
Edit: might be ELI12 answer, but maybe with other answers it can complement your knowledge.
Imagine you have a box of toys. Each toy has a different name, color, and shape. Normally, if you were to dump all the toys into this box without organising them it would take a while to find a specific toy or a toy with a specific property.
Microsoft Access allows you to dump all the toys into the box and have them be organised in a way that you can immediately find a specific toy, or toy with specific properties/information attached to it.
The way we do this is with a table-like system. In the toy example, each row (we call these ‘records’) would be an instance of a toy, and each column (we call these ‘fields’) would be all the properties of the toy such as name, color and shape. In the real world, records are often customers or products, and field may be things like customer IDs, names, phone numbers etc. etc.
To start with, think about it as like a spreadsheet (Excel) of info that is easy to search and pull info out of. It gets more complex, but start there.
So say you want to put together a list of different dogs you know. You come up with a list of attributes that you want to know about them – name, breed, weight, color, age, whether they like other dogs, whether they like cats.
You make a table in the program. This is your simple database.
These attributes are your columns. You can choose the way you want these to be filled in: text input (name), numeric (age, weight), a selection list (breed or color might be this, cats and dogs could be a yes/no list).
Usually you set an ID column as well, which is just a number that only applies to one dog’s record so you don’t mix them up. You could use name as an ID field, but what if you know two dogs with the same name?
So now you populate your database. Enter info for all the dogs you know.
Now, you have a database. Woohoo!
You can create reports – how many dogs do I know that are over 50 lbs and dog friendly? Place those in order of largest to smallest.
You can do a simple query – show me all dogs I know that like cats.
You can create a form so that in the future, it is simple to input new dogs.
Hope that helps!
A database management system is basically a program that will store data tables (think excel sheets) in an organized or structured way. These then let you “join” two or more tables in a handful of ways based on shared data between them. Namely, column A of table 1 contains area codes and column c of table 2 does, too. You can join these tables and see data from both in a single row when both tables have a record for that area code. In general, the idea is to save you from doing a lot of filtering or searching in each table independently
If you’re looking for a place to start, I damn near guarantee there’s a better platform than access. That said, access is good at a few things.
Forms – allows restricted user input in a weak gui. Better than just free text entry and creating the forms gets easier the more you do it. This is my favorite access feature
Connection to a more robust database with an “online database connection” or odbc – access is slow on even moderate sized databases, so you’re usually better off working in one language of sql or another and establishing a connection to stream data between them
Graphical query construction – a query is a way to search a table for surviving information. Access (and several sql flavors) allow you to do this by dragging and dropping tables into a graphical display to create links between them, choose columns (fields) to display or filter on, and modify the output.
Ultimately, I try to stay away from access like the plague. MySQL is free and does all the query stuff access can do (might not have a free gui, so you’d need to learn the syntax). Sql server management studio (very not free) is like access, except no form creation (to my knowledge), it’s faster than access, and you can do more with it, it even has a query design gui like access.
Do you have data to input? Back in the day, I used Access to build an input interface for my employees to enter customer data and an interface that would read the data and create address labels for mailing. When I say back in the day, I mean waaay back. People have created complete accounting systems with Access.
If you have limited knowledge of computers with data structures and data management a spreadsheet might be a place to start.
You can keep a list of contacts in a spreadsheet in excel or google sheets.
Col1 | Col 2 | Col 3
Name | Cell | Email
So the first column you put their names , then cell number followed by email. Now in excel there are endless columns and rows, in Access you define exactly what data you want to store.
Now perhaps your friend has a list of people with addresses that he send you over to you. So now you have 2 tables (or data collections) that have a common field of Name. So you could import that data into a new spreadsheet and manually look for common names. The real power of a database is that allows you to join datasets on common fields and perform searches, calculations, etc. To do this they develop their own languages, and most are based on SQL. Microsoft access as I remember also have some graphical UI abilities to automate it a bit.
But in the end you could create a command to combine the two (SQL statement in most databases).
This barely covers anything, but any database is just a place to efficiently store data for later searches and calculations.
P.S. Never (or knowingly evaluate) use a spreadsheet as a datastore unless it is for your own personal use. I used a spreadsheet here only a very simple structure/application you might be familiar with.
How familiar are you with Excel? Excel is great for working with tabular data, that is data which can be described as rows of entries with columns of the same kind of data for each entry. You might have a class of students. Each row represents the grades for each student along with their name and student ID number. Each colum might represent a particular assignment or exam. Now, what if you needed to store data like that for a whole school? You could have Excel spreadsheets for each class, but how would you handle individual student records from the different classes? Jimmy Smith is taking both physics and English, but he is also on the football team and he is supposed to ride the number 10 bus home. All that could be stored on several spreadsheets and someone might be able to sort through it, but it is better to build a database which is where Access comes in. In Access or other database managers, you can store several tables of data along with the relationships between them. You might have a master table of students and other tables for class rosters or the football lineup and you can cross-reference them using key values like student IDs. A problem you might solve in the school scenario I laid out is determining the academic eligibility of players on the football team. From the tables that we already have, you might have Access automatically construct another table that only contains students listed as members of the football team who have GPAs lower than 2.0 or who are failing any one class. Learning how to manage databases may only make sense if you have data to manage. You might need to find an example dataset to practice with
Basically you can compile a list of things like say all the dvds you own, if you add in lots of details you can get it to group all the films starring a particular person or by a particular director etc.
A database is just a collection of tables linked by some commonality. If you only have one table, you have a spreadsheet, if you have many tables linked together (we call that a ‘schema’) to produce a *record,* you have a database.
Think of a doctor’s office, it stores patient *records*, those records contain drug information, your history, scans/images, communications, payment methods, etc. It would be a very ugly table to store payment information and scans in the same table as your imaging data. To avoid this you create many tables and generate a schema, or a system that tells the database what columns and rows go together to form a record. This determines your query plan and optimization. You put data in, you have to know how to get it out. Say a table is updated somewhere, does it cascade, does it trigger some other event? Say you are working for that same medical office and you want an email sent out to the patient when their daily medication will run out. You store the information that the patient was given a 90 day count of some medicine, then the database will query itself to find patient records where it is 80 days past the prescription date and it triggers an action, it sends you an email. We call that a ‘stored procedure.’
Access is capable of some level of that, although you would use something like PostGres or Microsoft SQL or Oracle instead of access; but they are fundamentally similar in that they are all RDMS (relational database management systems). Interestingly, while we do talk about ‘relations’ in databases, particularly when we talk about ‘normalization’, but that is not what the ‘relational’ in RDMS is all about. It is a specific kind of algebra pioneered by a genius named Edgar F. Codd. If you fancy the fact you can get data out of a system reliably; in Codd we trust.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra)
There is a lot more to this, there are concepts like “ACID”, there are different kinds of databases that don’t use tables at all and use a key/value pair instead. There are graph databases that can relate information by using algorithms. It is a deep topic.
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