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Databases
Posting as doylex
I have always been interested in Databases. What got me started? My Mother collected all sorts of stuff like, records, cds, books, baseball cards to name a few. She had stacks and stacks of paper with hand written lists of all these items and the things she was needing (wanting) to add to her collection. There was a computer store in Roswell Mall in Roswell, Georgia that I would check out occasionally for games. This is where I saw Symantec’s Q&A Database program. I immediately thought this would be a cool way to organize her collections. It was relatively inexpensive and I learned it quickly. Using it in DOS on my Compaq Portable I created databases for each of her collections. She was into it and entered lots of the data herself. I printed out her lists to take out to stores when purchasing new collectibles. My boss, Dan McGinn-Combs, at Management Science America, where I worked in Hardware Support, was impressed and bought Q&A. He had me create in-house databases. It was great to collect data for reports and graphs, what management wanted to see. Later he would send me to classes on Microsoft Access, which I would continue using to create databases. My largest project was to create a help-desk database.
Here is some more information from WIKI:
Formally, a “database” refers to a set of related data and the way it is organized. Access to this data is usually provided by a “database management system” (DBMS) consisting of an integrated set of computer software that allows users to interact with one or more databases and provides access to all of the data contained in the database (although restrictions may exist that limit access to particular data). The DBMS provides various functions that allow entry, storage and retrieval of large quantities of information and provides ways to manage how that information is organized. The 1980s ushered in the age of desktop computing. The new computers empowered their users with spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 and database software like dBASE. The dBASE product was lightweight and easy for any computer user to understand out of the box. C. Wayne Ratliff, the creator of dBASE, stated: “dBASE was different from programs like BASIC, C, FORTRAN, and COBOL in that a lot of the dirty work had already been done. The data manipulation is done by dBASE instead of by the user, so the user can concentrate on what he is doing, rather than having to mess with the dirty details of opening, reading, and closing files, and managing space allocation.”[19] dBASE was one of the top selling software titles in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Q&A was a database and word processing software program for IBM PC-compatible computers published by Symantec and partners from 1985 to 1998. It was written by a team headed by Symantec founder Dr. Gary Hendrix,[1][2] Denis Coleman, and Gordon Eubanks. Released by Symantec in 1985 for MS-DOS computers, Q&A’s flat-file database and integrated word processing application is cited as a significant step towards making computers less intimidating and more user friendly. Among its features was a natural language search function based on a 600 word internal vocabulary
Microsoft Access is a database management system (DBMS) from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft Office suite of applications, included in the Professional and higher editions or sold separately. Microsoft Access stores data in its own format based on the Access Jet Database Engine. It can also import or link directly to data stored in other applications and databases.[3] Software developers, data architects and power users can use Microsoft Access to develop application software. Like other Microsoft Office applications, Access is supported by Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), an object-based programming language that can reference a variety of objects including the legacy DAO (Data Access Objects), ActiveX Data Objects, and many other ActiveX components. Visual objects used in forms and reports expose their methods and properties in the VBA programming environment, and VBA code modules may declare and call Windows operating system operations.
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2/13/20, 7:18 PM
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