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POWERBASE TUTORIAL 14a

by Laurie Jane Kern

Analyzing Our Second Primary Table.

 

In our last tutorial we redesigned our "People" Table and broke it down into several others, and as I promised you can now download the new Sample13 database, which incorporates these changes.

Following the same line of reasoning we can look at the fields we indicated that we might want in our "Business" table, and make our changes and additions before we actually make the Table in our database.

Here are the fields from our Business Table:

Business Table
Company Name
Address Line 1
Address Line 2
City
Region
Postal Code
Country
Telephone Main
Telephone - Direct
Fax
Email
URL
Business Type
Notes

I am NOT going to go over the rules of normalization as we did in tutorial 13a (Ok you can stop cheering now!). But I would like you to keep the Rules of Normalization in the back of you mind, because if you ever work on a desktop database or Server-Based database, these concepts will be very important!

What we are going to do in this tutorial is discuss the "changes and additions" for the Business Table and why they are being made.

Yes, you guessed it;  the first addition I recommend is the addition of an ID field, and then we should combine Address1 and Address2 into Address. These changes are made for the same reasons as in Tutorial 13a.  Next we should remove the Telephone Direct field.  If you plan on putting a contact's "telephone extension" in this field - DON'T because that would violate Rule Two! This Table is about businesses and putting a contact's direct phone number or extension in here would be adding data about a contact not a business!! Now - what about the EMAIL field? Who does that belong to? - Does it belong to a contact, the president of the company, or the sales department, or tech support? Maybe that should go also!  We can put that in another Table later on. The URL can stay because some companies do have a "Home Page" Finally we should change the appropriate fields so we can use the lookup Tables for Country, Region, Business Type

Here is our "revised" Business Table:

Field Name Field Type
ID Auto
Company Name Text
Address Text
City Text
Region Relational
Postal Code Text
Country Relational
Telephone Text
Fax Text
URL Text
Business Type Relational
Notes Text or Memo

I hope by now you know what we are going to do in the next tutorial - we are going to take the Business Table design and we are going to split it into several other Tables.

Stay tuned!

© LJKern and FoxPop 1999

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