If you stored all that data in one field, you’d have a hard time searching for all the people in Washington state. address often contains several pieces of information: street name, optional suite number, city, state, and Zip code. In database lingo, those bits of information are individually significant, and each one should get its own field.įor example, a U.S.

Instead, think about what elements-no matter how small-are important to how you’ll search, sort, analyze, and otherwise access your records later.

It’s usually a bad move to have different kinds of information in the same field. What if you need to sort your data by last name? If you’ve entered names the way you might type them in a word processor (first name and then last name), you’d only be able to sort by the person’s first name. How do you decide which fields to create?įor example, you may create a single Name field to hold lease signers’ first and last names-but you’d be making a mistake. Your database tracks lease documents, and its fields will include all the important attributes about those documents. UP TO SPEED: A Field = Individually Significant Data

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