Microsoft® Office Access 2003 Inside Out

An Application Design Strategy

The two major schools of thought on designing databases are process-driven design (also known as top-down design), which focuses on the functions or tasks you need to perform, and data-driven design (also known as bottom-up design), which concentrates on identifying and organizing all the bits of data you need. The method I describe here incorporates some of the best ideas from both philosophies.

The method I like to use starts by identifying and grouping tasks to decide whether you need only one database or more than one database. (This is a top-down approach.) As explained previously, databases should be organized around a group of related tasks, or functions. For each task, you choose the individual elements of ...