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Now let's examine these situations more closely in terms of two requirements:
You have to decide what you want to get out of the database—that is, what goals you want to accomplish.
You have to figure out what you're going to put into the database—that is, what data you will keep track of.
Perhaps it seems backward to think about what comes out of the database before considering what goes into it. After all, you must enter your data before you can retrieve it. But the way you use a database is driven by your goals, and those are more closely associated with what you want to get from your database than with what you put into it. You certainly aren't going to waste time and effort putting information into a database unless you're going to use it for something later.
The U.S. Historical League
The initial situation for this scenario is that you as League secretary maintain the membership list using a word processing document. That works reasonably well for generating a printed directory but limits what else you can do with the information. You have the following objectives in mind:
You want to be able to produce output from the directory in different formats, using only information appropriate to the application. One goal is to be able to generate the printed directory each year—a requirement the League has had in the past that you plan to continue to carry out. You can think of other uses for the information in the directory, too—for example, to provide the current member list for the printed program that's handed out to attendees of the League's annual banquet. These applications involve different sets of information. The printed directory uses the entire contents of each member's entry. For the banquet program, you need to pull out only member names (something that hasn't been easy using a word processor).
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