why use a Database vs hierarchical notes

[vilasman]

Hopefully there are some handbase users out there. I am probably going to buy handbase to play with it, but my question is, what is the advantage of using handbase to keep track of information over a notes pogram like phatnotes?

[Sven Johannsen]

Depends on the nature of the data you want to store and manipulate. If you have a lot of chunks of data that individually are made up of a number of unique attributes, a DB is the optimum way of storing and organizing them. A good example on your PPC already, is your contacts. You have a lot of contacts each made up of pieces of information. You can sort, search, filter, by any individual piece of info.

You can relate things together in DBs. For example you can have Contacts, with a field called Company, and a table called Company with fields for address, main phone, products, etc. When you link these, you can just put the company in the contact field for an individual, and have access to all the company info, without having to repeat it for each contact in that company.

In a DB you can specify valid field entries. A field for Sex, can be limited to Male and Female, avoiding entries like M/F, Boy/Girl or Hopefully/Rarely. Makes compiling statistics easier if the responses are limited and consistant.

You can do some of this with a notes program, but only if the notes allow tagging them in some way so that you can identify attributes, such as personal, business, or by project each note is associated with for example. At that point you are actually dealing with a rudimentary database, with the predominant field being a free form text field.