This series of articles will take you step by step through the process of learning what databases are all about, analyzing and organizing your data, and finally creating and using your own database applications. It doesn't matter which database product you decide to use, since the principles of good database design are always the same. But the emphasis will be on content, not technique, so you can easily apply whatever you learn to your database product of choice. The real world is full of databases, and has been for a long time. We organize this information in different ways, depending on how we expect to use it.
Telephone books are alphabetic, by residential areas or by commercial categories.
Card catalogs are arranged alphabetically by title, by author, and by subject, using slight variations of the same basic data. And check registers are normally sequenced by check numbers, which generally correspond to chronological dates, but not always. So what we have is a collection of facts and figures, arranged to answer predictable questions. The way the data is organized depends on the types of questions the data is supposed to answer. At one point it described just the data itself, stored in a particular format.