Wildstrom, Stephen H. From Apple: Organization Made Easy; Using the vocabulary of !Tunes, Bento makes the power of the database user-friendly. Business Week. New York: Feb. 18, 2008. , Iss. 4071; pg. 76
This article from Business Week discusses the importance of databases to the everyday consumer. Everyday we use databases to buy plane tickets, make online purchases, to pay our bills or get our paychecks and many other everyday essential tasks. The article mentions however useful these databases maybe in our daily lives there are very few individuals with the programming knowledge to create such databases on our own personal computers.
The article reports that FileMaker which is a part of Apple Inc. has come up with an application that will change all that. It created a $50 database called Bento for use on Mac computers. The firm took an existing data-base management program called FileMaker Pro which is used in small businesses and combined it with the Mac's new operating system. This new organization tool can be used at home to manage personal information like planning a birthday party or a simple project at work. Instead of using traditional database terminology, Bento mimics the database interface that most personal users are most familiar with, the ITunes library. It doesn't use the term database to describe a collection of data but rather calls such a collection a "library." The system maybe user friendly but it still has the advantages of a traditional database including data security, sophisticated searches, and filtering.
This type of database would be very useful for organizing personal data at home or small projects that are not complicated enough to need a regular database like FileMaker Pro. Unfortunately, right now it is only available for Mac computers. Hopefully the product will become popular just like !Tunes did and it will be offered in a version that is compatible with PCs. I think this article is very relevant to what was discussed in Chapter 6 of the textbook on the use of databases to improve business performance and decision making. I believe these same concepts hold true in our daily lives. We are constantly faced with decisions ranging from whether to buy a house to how to balance a family's busy school, work, and activity schedules. If there was a way to store all the important information we need to make decisions in our personal lives then we all might be able to use our limited time and resources more wisely.
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Interesting finding. Libraries could work out for both personal purpose and for storing files for companies, although it may still be a long way to taking place of database.
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