Databases can be summarised and totalled by any of the fields or columns.

This simple technique is very powerful and can be used in many ways to investigate the database :-

• Purchases from various suppliers in a purchasing database can be summarised, to see that your buyers are following company policy.

• Failures in an incident database can be summarised by Day of the Week or Hour of the Day to see if there is an underlying pattern.

• Name and address databases can be summarised to look for duplicate records.