ABSTRACT
Several reporters use database managers to perform enterprising comparisons of files never created to be linked together, as Robert Gebeloff, now at The New York Times, did in cross-referencing files of licensed health-care providers and recently convicted criminals. The database managers can automatically create key fields of ID's or can use an already existing ID. This chapter covers relational databases, in which files known as tables are intentionally joined to one another. Information is separated into linked tables because it organizes the information and cuts back on the amount of time it takes to do data entry and analysis. Utilizing a database manager and relational databases to do these tasks, once done with hard-copy records, is the way this traditional kind of reporting is now typically performed. The chapter explains some basic Structured Query Language (SQL) statements because SQL is a straight forward programming language that every good database manager has for analysis.
