New Member Introduction - Seeking Guidance and Tips

You don't mention if you have previous relational DB experience. If you come from the spreadsheet world, I would say that understanding and getting comfortable with relationships is very important.

One example of this is when you find yourself wanting to create multiple fields that store the same type of data, like cost or phone number or address or worker, and you find your self adding a 1 or 2 at the end of the field name.

You have a job record and you want to store the workers assigned to the job. You would be tempted to create worker1 and worker2 and worker3.

or

You have a contact table and store phone numbers, so you create mobile1 and mobile2, or even work, home, fax.

or

You have a project record and you have duedate1, duedate2, duedate3.

One reason not to do it this way is what happens if you only have 1 worker? Now you have two empty slots. What if you have a job with 10 workers? Now you have to go back and add 7 more slots and now all of your records have these empty slots.

The way to do this in a relational DB is to create a new table that you then link. Now you can store one instance of the data, or two, or twenty, or one hundred.

Another reason is trying to find anything amongst all these fields is a nightmare.

If you want to find a worker that worked on a job you have write code that searches each field for the worker. Then you have to update the code if you added more fields.