Getting to Know MS Access 2003, Part 2 - Data Distribution
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Let’s say you are going to build a database for your contacts. We’ll call this a ‘contact management database’ because that’s what Microsoft calls it. Before you build, you must decide how to distribute your data. How do you do this?
Well, you can divide your data by the user of the information, for example by department manager or sales clerk. In our example of a contact management database however, the contacts are personal.
Another method is to distribute data so as to reduce redundancy. In our own contact management database we might create separate tables for our types of contacts as well as our actual contacts. We do this so as not to repeat ourselves by unnecessarily having to type the type of contact over and over again in the contacts table. This has an added advantage as we’ll see next.
The third method is to decide how many records you are going to have in each table. For example, if we have 50 different contact types and 150 contacts, they will need separate tables. For example, let’s say I have a large number of personal contacts. I could lump them all together into one table, but I don’t want to do this because it would be hard for me to distinguish between contacts of Organization A and Organization B, for instance. Assuming I haven’t memorized the names of all my contacts and what organization they belong to, then it would be helpful to separate them into different groups. This is where the separation of tables comes in handy.
The fourth and final method of distributing your data is in the case of old data that is mainly for archival purposes. There is no reason to have this data in your main tables; it is helpful to separate them.
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