Hi Richard,

First of all, I need to tell you that I find these seminars and your tutorials to be very helpful.  I am understanding the different components and purposes for creating a database in a way that makes sense to me.  So thank you.

Regarding relationships and when to use them; I am creating a database to store information on my students.  I think I want one database with three different tables.  One for students who are in the "early intervention" process, those who are receiving "interventions" and those who are identified as "special education".  Within each table I am documenting meetings, student progress, and history of support services provided.  Would this be one database with all of this information stored in it, or should I actually build three databases?  I want to be able to see which students went through our early intervention process, who ended up qualifying for Special Ed and what interventions they went through.  So I think it would be all in one.  Is that right?

Thanks,
Julie

---

Reply from Richard Rost:

I like to keep all of one THING in the same table. So you should have a STUDENTS table (StudentT). In that table, you can differentiate between "early intervention," "intervention," and "special ed" with different classifications (a single field). No need to put these students in three different tables.

Meetings, progress, history of support services provided... these all go in different tables... just like how I break out CONTACT HISTORY from CUSTOMERS in my Access Expert series.

You don't need three different databases. The only way you'd need to make separate database files is you're reaching the 2 GB limit on database size (which I doubt). You may also want different databases if different USERS need to have access to the different student info and you don't want to go through setting up security in the database itself. You could make 3 different database files with different passwords.