Linux Format

Databases made quick and easy

These days, databases are more routinely associated with powering websites and ecommerce systems. To the casual user they look impenetrable, involving connecting to third-party database servers such as SQL and hiding behind opaque languages like PHP. But at their heart, databases are simple tables of information: each row represents a single record, and its specific characteristics – such as name, colour, or whether it’s currently in your possession or not – are recorded in columns known as fields.

If your needs are modest, then you don’t need to learn any programming languages or tackle complex database software to put together a collection of information you can later search in various ways to find what you need from it. Indeed, many people build such simple databases using spreadsheet software, but even here there’s a whole new interface to learn and tools to find. There are only so many hours in the day.

Luckily, there’s a whole host of simple, user-friendly tools that wrap up simple databases in software anyone can set up and use within minutes. Many are geared towards specific tasks, such as cataloguing a.

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