Access 2010: The Missing Manual

Relationship Practice

Every database designer needs to see the world in terms of tables and relationships. Savvy database designers can quickly assess information and see how it’s related. With this ability, they can build just the right database for any situation.

The following sections provide two scenarios that help you practice more realistic relationship building. Both databases used in these scenarios are available with the samples for this chapter, and they’ll turn up again in the following chapters, when you start to build more sophisticated database objects like queries, reports, and forms.

The Music School

Cacophoné Studios runs a medium-sized music school. They have a fixed series of courses in mind, and a roster of teachers that can fill in for most of them. They also have a long list of past and potential customers. Last year, a small catastrophe happened when 273 students were crammed into the same class and no teacher was assigned to teach it. (Next door, a class of 14 had somehow ended up with three instructors.) They’re hoping that Access can help them avoid the same embarrassment this time around.

Tip

Want to play along with Cacophoné Studios? Try to pick out possible tables and their relationships before reading ahead.

Identifying the tables

Every business is a little different, and it would take a long, detailed analysis to get the perfect table structure for Cacophoné Studios. However, even without knowing that much, you can pick out some fairly obvious candidates: ...