Many thanks to Gianluca for a direct answer to my question and to Seth for the link to his tutorial on association and datasets. I had seen the tutorial by Seth and it, in fact, was what got me interested in what could be done in Mathematica relative to databases. I just had not absorbed all the information in his post.
Seth, you are correct in your sense that my background is in languages other than Mathematica. I first started programming in Fortran and then switched to Matlab after it was commercially available.
