![]() And while I’m at it I guess I should emphasize that the Name column is not ‘Column A’ in a spreadsheet!! This is where Airtable’s spreadsheet analogy might confuse some users who are familiar with spreadsheets but don’t know anything about data modeling.Of course, if you do so, then, as far as Airtable is concerned, those are 47 unique and different people all coincidentally sharing the name ‘Kevin Bacon’. If you don’t want to store SSNs in your table (for sound reasons) and you don’t have anything else like drivers license number or student number, then you can create 47 records with the value “Kevin Bacon” in the Name column. The ‘Name’ column doesn’t have to have a unique value.As Tim pointed out, Airtable handles all the key values invisibly. It emphatically is NOT the primary key for the table or even a proxy or alias for the primary key.You might make SSN the primary descriptor, or StudentNumber or something like that. And even if each record in the table represents a person, the ‘Name’ field might more usefully be used to store something else. For example it can be a Phone Number data type and you could rename it ‘Phone Number’. Luckily, you aren’t stuck with either the single line text data type or the column name ‘Name’. As I suggested already, it’s not really a name field.It may be helpful to think about what Airtable’s ‘Name’ field is NOT. But if the table represents an entity that’s not personal, then the column name ‘Name’ can be misleading or confusing, for newbies. Instead, Airtable takes care of the ID/primary key for you invisibly, and instead asks you to answer the question “ What Is It About This Record That Makes It So Darned Special?” Actually, that’d be a better name for the default column than ‘Name.’ If it weren’t so long.Īnyway, if the entity the table represents is people, ‘Name’ might not be a bad term for the specialness descriptor, especially if your data set is small. ![]() This would of course be pretty pointless, but it’s possible. In FileMaker, you could create a table that had just one field, the primary key field. If you were able to see it, the primary key 03549674511 would tell you that this record is different from another record whose primary key value = 03549674512, but the key values do not tell you how one record differs from the other (more precisely, how the thing one record refers to in the real world is different from the thing referred to by the other record). The unique primary key value for each record guarantees this uniqueness but doesn’t in any way characterize it. Whether you’re working in Airtable or FileMaker (or any other database system), within a given table, each row should represent a unique instance of some thing (‘entity’). Unfortunately, calling this column ‘Name’ by default leads, I think, to some confusion. The Name column is how Airtable protects casual users from the abstractions involved in database design (like ‘entity’). Once you get used to it, you’ll probably find as I have that a lot of stuff that takes some work in FileMaker is easy as pie in Airtable. If you’re coming from FileMaker Pro (like Tim or like me), Airtable’s handling of relationships takes a little getting used to. It’s been a very long day! Feel free to reach out to me either here or via email ( if you need anything else. ![]() (Again, you’ll never see the primary keys that Airtable is really using.) The nice thing about this is that you can change a record’s name value, and any relationships that the record is involved in will be maintained. In Airtable, when you relate records from one table to another, it is the “name” field that you use to select a related record. You can even setup a name column so that it acts in a way similar to the auto-increment fields that we often use in FileMaker databases. For example, you can change the column’s name, its type, and so on. You can change the name field if you’d like. The “name” field is sort of like an alternate primary key, which, as users, we can see and use to identify records in a more user-friendly way. You won’t normally see those values in the Airtable interface, but if you poke around in the API, you will see how they are used. Behind the scenes, each record is assigned a UUID, and it is that value which Airtable really uses as the primary key. With Airtable, all of that is done for you. Normally, we have to explicitly specify a primary key on a table, so that we can setup relationships to it from other tables. The “name” field can be a little confusing for those of us coming from database platforms such as FileMaker. Welcome to Airtable - and I’m glad to hear that you’re enjoying it. ![]()
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