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A database is a .pdb file holding games. One database is open at a time; its name is in the tooltip of the database icon of the toolbar. In your file manager a database has the document icon of your system with a database and a pawn on the page; opening it opens Pragma Chess with the database in the project you left open.

• Database ▸ New Database… creates an empty one in the Databases folder.
• Database ▸ Open Database… opens a file from anywhere.
• Database ▸ Switch Database lists the databases of the folder: choose one to open it. The database icon of the toolbar drops down the same list.
• Database ▸ Database Settings… (also from the right-click menu of the database at the top of the tree) edits the name and the description, says whether the database is a collection of games, an opening book or Puzzles and Training, and has Optimize Database. In a Puzzles and Training database (Endgame Training and Tactics Training are) the games list does not show the moves, so the solution stays hidden, and a game opened from it starts in Training Mode: the board turns to the side to move, which is yours, and the engine plays the other. Where a game names no players, the list and the board show your name, the one in Personal Settings, on the side to move and Pragma Coach on the other: stand-in names, not written in the database, and the list sorts by them too. In the same way the Event column is called Theme there and shows each puzzle's theme, the most telling of those lichess gives it: Fork, Mate in 2, Rook Endgame. A database with a name is shown by it, the file in brackets after it — My Games (games.pdb) — in Switch Database and at the top of the tree, where the name is in bold.
• Database ▸ Save Database As… writes a copy.
• Database ▸ Switch Database ▸ Show Databases Folder opens the folder in the file manager.

Changes to a database are written as you make them: there is nothing to save by hand.

Pragma Chess comes with two databases to train on, added to the Databases folder: Endgame Training — the classic theoretical endgames (the basic mates, the opposition, Lucena, Philidor…) with their goal, and more than two thousand endgame puzzles — and Tactics Training, puzzles of twenty themes, from easy to hard. The puzzles come from the lichess.org puzzle database (free, CC0); each starts once the opponent has moved, with you to find the answer: play it in Training Mode, or step through the solution. Find them in the tree under Endgames and Tactics. A training database you delete is not added again.