What is a Database?

A Diamond Mind Baseball database contains everything you need to play games (leagues, teams, players, parks, schedules, real-life statistics and ratings), track the results of those games (boxscores, scoresheets, game scores, and computer-league statistics), generate reports, and manage a season from start to finish.

In earlier versions of DMB, databases were referred to as season disks, player directories, or player disks. For a variety of reasons, each of those terms is outdated. A database can contain all of the items needed to play a single season, but it doesn't have to be limited to one season. A database contains a lot more than just players. With the advent of Windows95, directories are now more often described as folders. And CDs have replaced floppy disks for many people. So we have adopted the term database because that's really what it is -- a collection of data of various types that you put together for the purpose of playing league games or exhibition games.

Each database is stored in a separate folder on your hard disk. We generally find it easiest to manage those databases if they are all stored as subfolders within the folder in which you installed the Diamond Mind Baseball game. But you can create a database anywhere on your hard drive or on a network.

If you purchase a Season Disk, Greatest Teams Disk, or Greatest Players Disk from Diamond Mind, you can install it using the Install season disk command on the File menu. These products are shipped as a single compressed file that you can receive via download from DMB's online store or through the mail on CD. The install command takes care of creating a folder on your hard drive, extracting the files, and adding this new database to the list of databases that you can use with DMB.

All copies of DMB come with our Greatest Teams #2 disk, so you will always have at least one database installed with your game. Whenever you have more than one database installed, one of them is the active database. This is the database whose contents display in the Organizer window, and from which you select games to play, and where the data for the reports is found. You can use the Change active database command to switch among the databases that are installed with your game.

Many people find that they never need to create their own databases. They are quite happy playing games from one of the many season disks and greatest teams/players disks that are available from Diamond Mind. But you can create your own databases, too. Here are a few reasons why you might want to do that:

• you can import teams (along with their players and parks) from one database to another so you can create a new league using teams from different Diamond Mind season disks

• DMB includes the tools you need to create your own players, parks, teams, leagues, and schedules from scratch

• using the players from one Diamond Mind Season Disk, you may want to play some seasons using the real-life rosters and schedules, while playing other games using totally new rosters drafted from the same player pool. You can do this by creating one or more copies of the initial database and setting up a different league in each of these new databases.

For these reasons, DMB provides commands for creating a new database (either an empty one or a copy of the currently active database), deleting a database, and switching to a new active database.

If there is a database on your hard drive or your network that Diamond Mind Baseball doesn't know about, you can add it to the list of available databases with the Add reference to existing database command. Such a database might have been created with an earlier version of Diamond Mind Baseball, or you may have created it outside of the game using Windows commands to copy folders and/or files.

Anytime you install a Diamond Mind Season Disk, add a reference to an existing database, or choose a new active database, DMB checks to see what version those files are in. If DMB detects that this new database not already in the new format, it asks you whether you wish to convert it to the new format. If you say no, DMB will not allow this database to become the active database. If you say yes, DMB converts the data from it's old format to the format of the current version of the game. (Sorry, DMB cannot convert data in formats older than version 8.)

Because many of you will pour dozens or hundreds of hours into playing DMB games, it's always a good idea to make backups of your active databases from time to time. For that purpose, DMB includes commands that assist you in backing up and restoring your DMB databases.

Finally, many of you create leagues for your own use or play in leagues with other DMB owners that carry rosters forward from year to year. You can use the Migrate command to carry forward the structure of your league (rules, divisional setup, schedule, rosters) from one year to the next. If not for this command, you would have to spend many hours setting up your league when the new season disk is published each year.