Database Table Design Basics

Database Systems Design is a huge concept, much bigger than most people realize. It has evolved into a specialty niche within the Computer Science realm which includes dozens of diciplines including Artifical Intelligence (AI), Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Data Processing, Computer Graphics, etc. High quality software design goes hand-in-hand with high-quality database design to ensure an application continues to be maintainable, flexible, reliable, scalable (to name a few) as it evolves to new needs over time.

Your design should start out on paper at a high level. Don't dive into the actual data items until you've mapped out the big picture. What are the functional areas of your website that you'll need to store information for. This will indicate which different tables are needed. Then you can start to make lists of all the items you think you need for each table.

Things get a little trickier when you start to 'relate' tables to each other. Almost all database are relational database and relating data together effectively is what constitute good database design. One of the primary concepts here is called Normalization which is a set of guidelines for organizing data efficiently.

Database Table Relational Types

• Master Tables - Reference tables that define a set of attributes about a specific subject. For example a Contact table contains name, address, email, and phone information about people you've had contact with. Try this Master Table Demo
• Transaction Tables - Tables that store (sometimes time sensitive) recurring instances of a data relationship. For example, in an invoicing system with an Invoice master table which defines the primary attributes of an invoice (company name and contact info), the transaction table would store each of the invoice lines for each billing debit item as well as date sensitive credit payments against the master invoice. Try this Transaction Table Demo
• Junction/Join Tables - Tables that contain common fields from two tables that have a many-to-many relationship. For example, a school might track students, classes, and which classes each student is enrolled in. Try this Junction/Join Table Demo

Try out all of our Data Entry Input Program Demos, the Master Table Demo, the Transaction Table Demo, or our Junction/Join Table Demo, They are all fully functional examples of data entry programs for finding, entering, navigating forward and backward through, and deleting fictional contact, invoice and school classes information.

Please contact us for questions or more information about our custom data entry programs.