INFORMATION SHEET NUMBER 2

Planning and Designing a Database

Careful planning is very important to effective database management. Some have immediately
created a database without planning and have been disappointed that the database he or she created
does not serve its purpose or contains so many fields that are not important.
Correcting such errors can become a tiresome job.

The Stages in Planning a Database

1. Identifying the information we would need
2. How the information can be accessed
3. How they should look when printed.
Determining appropriate data inputs for your database
There are three stages of database design:
1. Data Definition
- is the stage where we gather and list necessary fields for database. We think of
all the things we need to store in the database.
Ex. In library system project, the fields we need for the three tables shown below:

2. Data Refinement
- you have break to down some fields to more specific fields so we can store
information in smallest logical parts. For example, students ‘ name are often split
into two fields ,First Name and Last Name, so that its easy to sort date by Last
Name. The same goes with the address field (If we have to include this
field).Anytime we want to search for students that live in a particular city , we can
simply specify what city we are looking for and all the students that live in that
city would be displayed
3. Establishing Relationship between tables
- we analyze our tables more closely and create a relationship between tables so
that we will be able to view and access records from both tables.
Relationship – association established between common fields in two tables.
Types of Relationships
1. one-to-one 2. one-to-many 3. Many-to-many

Creating a Table Structure

It is very important that there is a field
or set that uniquely identifies each individual
record in the table in order for Access to
connect information stored in separate tables.
This field is called primary key.
 Primary Key – is one or more fields (columns) whose value or values uniquely
identify each record in a table.