Getting to Know MS Access 2003, Part 2
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Last week you looked at the Microsoft Access 2003 interface and help functions. This week you’ll learn what a relational database is and how to create your first database.
There are several types of databases, as you learned in last week’s lesson. Access 2003 is a relational database. A relational database is one which stores logically-related data in tables. Tables are the most important objects in relational databases; you’ll learn more about tables next week. The other objects, such as forms, reports, and queries, are just better ways of entering, deleting, and retrieving data; we’ll learn more about these in a later lesson.
In any of your databases, you could store all your data in one table, such as you would do in a flat file database like Excel, but this wouldn’t make good use of Access’s power. Generally, you will want to distribute your data among several tables. The following are some of the major advantages of a relational database such as Access:
- Data redundancy is reduced, decreasing hard disk storage space and increasing processing speed.
- Each table in the database contains data pertinent to only one object.
- Information is easy to locate and manage because the tables are small and uncomplicated.
- Changes to data need only be made in one place in the database, not in many different locations as might be the case with Excel for example; this is because changes propagate in Access
- Distributing data across tables allows for more powerful grouping, sorting, and filtering capabilities
Next: Data Distribution >>
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