DATABASE DESIGN &

STRUCTURING DATA
STRUCTURE OF A FILE CREATED IN
MS ACCESS
TERMS USED TO IDENTIFY THE
COMPONENTS OF A FILE
 Entity − name can be useful when naming tables − becomes a record (row) in a table
 Attribute − name can be useful when naming fields − becomes a field name (column heading)
 Relationships − i) 1:M (one to many)
ii) M:N (many to many) cannot be implemented in a Relational database. A link/junction/intermediary
table needs introducing to solve t M:N relationship.
iii) 1:1 (one to one)
 Keys i)primary (uniquely identifies a record in the table, can only have 1 primary key per table)
ii)Composite primary (combination of fields to uniquely identify a record in the table, can only have 1
composite primary key in a table)
iii) foreign (field in one table that is a primary key in another, can have multiple foreign keys in a table)
 Referential integrity - accuracy and consistency of data within a relationship
e.g. changing a primary key in one table must cascade through to all relevant foreign keys
•
• Activity 2a
Data validation and verification
• Data

Verification Validation
These are methods used by These are methods used by
users to manually check the the soft wares to check the
validity of data entered validity of data entered by the
i. Proof reading users
ii. Double entry i. Range check
ii. Type Check
iii. Presence check
iv. Length check
DATA TYPES
•
• • Text − limited length (short text = 255 characters, can be limited further by specifying a field size) −
unlimited length/memo
• • Number

• − byte
• − integer
• − long integer
• − double
• − decimal
• − AutoNumber
• • Date/time
• • Currency
• • Boolean (yes/no, on/off, true/false).
 EXTRA NOTE ON NUMBER TYPES
 Byte, Integer and Long Integer
Integers in Access come in 1, 2 and 4 byte varieties. The single byte number is named Byte (Range 0-255),
the two-byte number is named Integer (-32768 to 32767)
and then there is the Long Integer (-2 billion to 2 billion).

 Decimal
Decimal numbers are so called fixed point numbers. They can have a fractional part, and they can be either positive or negative.
Decimals have a fixed number of digits to left and to the right of the decimal point. The maximum total number of digits supported by Access is 28.
Decimals are used for exact numeric values.
Despite the name "Decimal" you can also use the decimal data type for integers larger than the range supported by the Long Integer type.
Decimals are only supported by Microsoft Access 2000 and later. A decimal number uses 17 bytes of disk space.

 Currency
The currency type is a special kind of decimal, with up to 4 digits on the right of the decimal point and up to 15 on the left.
It was introduced for financial data and is available in all versions of Access. This type uses 8 bytes of disk space.

 Float and Double

Floating point numbers are similar to numbers written in scientific notation, and come in two varieties: float and double.
They have a precision of up about 7 decimal digits (float) or 15 digits (double).
The exponent (location of decimal point) is stored separately, an can range from -45 to +38 (float) or from -324 to 308 (double).
Use floating point numbers if you require a large range but only limited precision. Floats use 4 bytes, and doubles use 8 bytes of disk space.
• Activity 2b