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Anyone good in Access that can lend a hand?

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CheffoJeffo:

--- Quote from: boykster on February 17, 2008, 07:24:04 pm ---you should abstract your client table and your witness table away from the case table, meaning take the case number data element out of those two tables and make them independant.  You want in theory for a witness to be able to be a witness for any case, and to have multiple witnesses per case.  Additionally, you want a client to be a client for more than one case.

--- End quote ---

 :applaud:

shmokes:
Yeah . . . what Boykster said sounds MUCH more like the way I learned it way back when.  I've had to learn the very very basics of Access twice in my life (for a class), but I've never actually had to use it in the real world.  What Boykster said is exactly what I wanted to say, but could not fully retrieve all the necessary info from the deep recesses of my memory.   :cheers:

Like Boykster said, it sounds like for this assignment you can probably get by with doing it my way, but if this is stuff that she really ought to learn, don't do it.  It's kind of a tough concept to wrap your head around at first, but once it clicks, it clicks.  Do it my way and it's not going to fully click.

edit: Oh yeah . . . it just occurred to me that what I said probably doesn't make much sense because my post came after Boykster's.  Actually, he hadn't posted when I started typing, and then when I went to post it said someone else had already posted, but I just saw Chad's "MIS" comment.  Had I seen Boykster's I probably would have just scrapped my post.  :)

boykster:
I'll admit it, I'm a ringer; I've done database design for over a decade for all kinds of data systems, specifically focused on scalable datasystems for diverse data models. 

Shmokes's approach is perfectly valid for a small system and creates much simpler business rules to work with, but a scalable solution would normalize it even more than my first suggestion - have a single "contacts" table, abstract the addresses into a seperate address table, etc.  That way a witness/client/etc could have more than 1 address, etc.

You should have some good stuff to work from in this thread though  :cheers:

ChadTower:

--- Quote from: boykster on February 17, 2008, 11:21:19 pm ---I'll admit it, I'm a ringer; I've done database design for over a decade for all kinds of data systems, specifically focused on scalable datasystems for diverse data models. 

--- End quote ---

It should also be noted neither the question, nor the discussion, have anything to do with Access.  It is all about schema design.  That is a development issue you may not expect an MIS grad to know intimately.

ChadTower:

--- Quote from: pinballjim on February 18, 2008, 09:45:31 am ---Maybe they don't know how to use -your- weird database system, but they'd understand the principles here thoroughly.

--- End quote ---


Schema design is common across any DBMS.  It is independent of application.  The only thing that differs, really, from Access to Oracle is economy of scale, which is what boykster was talking about.

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