Essential Database Concepts
Here are the Four Commandments of databases. You will find lots more important rules and guidelines in MS-Access as you discover how to work with various Access objects, but these four apply right from the start, no matter what kind of database you are using:
Store information where it belongs, not where it appears:
Where you store information has nothing to do with where it appears. In a database, you store information in tables based on the structure of the information. Each piece of information likely appears in lots of different places. For example, in a database for an online bookstore, book titles and authors’ names appear on your invoices, purchase orders, and sales receipts. But the right place to store those book titles and author names is in the Books table, not in the Sales table or the Purchase Orders table.
Garbage in, Garbage Out (GIGO):
If you do not bother to create a good, sensible design for your database - and if you are not careful to enter correct, clean data - your database will end up full of garbage. A welldesigned database is easier to maintain than a badly designed one, because each piece of information is stored only once, in a clearly named field in a clearly named table, with the proper validation rules in place. Yes, it sounds like a lot of work, but cleaning up a database of 10,000 incorrect records is (pardon the understatement) even more work.
Separate your data from your programs:
If you create a database to be shared with (or distributed to) other people, store all the tables in one database (the back end) and all the other objects in another database (the front end). Then you link these two databases together to make everything work. Separating the tables from everything else streamlines the whole rigmarole of updating queries, forms, reports, or other stuff later without disturbing the data in the tables.
Back up early and often:
Make a backup of your database every day. With luck, your office already has a system of regular (probably nightly) backups that includes your database. If not, make a backup copy of your database at regular intervals, and certainly before making any major changes.