I have a question about table design. I will be using Access 2010 or 2013, that shouldnt effect my question.
My buddy and I are designing a database at his school that is going to collect information on students like how often they use their phones in class and other issues that come up. We are also setting it up to keep track of when a parent is contacted and by which meothod they are contacted.
Having created a cople databases i am familiar with some concepts. The issue for us is the same for a couple bits of data we are collecting. We have seperate tables for students and parents. To me it seems better to have new records for each parent. So 1 kid 2 parents is 1 record for the student table and 2 for the parent table. Since normalization is important. My question is if a parent has more then 1 kid, should the tables be related by a field that is a multi select. This way multiple kids are attached to one parent.
The same issue comes up with creating records for instances with issues with students. If on the students table there is a field for issues, should it be a multi select so as to tie issues to that specific student?
Of course the primary key would be the related field. There may have been a third place where I feel a simular concept is used. What I am trying to figure out is since parents can have an indetermined number of kids, how does one best organize an undetermined number of variables as this. I know setting a table up with fields of kid1, kid2.... kid9, kid10 is ridiculous.
I am have used multi selct fieds before and found them to be useful. Since this database may use a few of them I wanted to see if better ideas were possible. As I said we only have Access to work with, other platforms may be better suited but not a tool we have. Any help is appreciated, thank you.
My buddy and I are designing a database at his school that is going to collect information on students like how often they use their phones in class and other issues that come up. We are also setting it up to keep track of when a parent is contacted and by which meothod they are contacted.
Having created a cople databases i am familiar with some concepts. The issue for us is the same for a couple bits of data we are collecting. We have seperate tables for students and parents. To me it seems better to have new records for each parent. So 1 kid 2 parents is 1 record for the student table and 2 for the parent table. Since normalization is important. My question is if a parent has more then 1 kid, should the tables be related by a field that is a multi select. This way multiple kids are attached to one parent.
The same issue comes up with creating records for instances with issues with students. If on the students table there is a field for issues, should it be a multi select so as to tie issues to that specific student?
Of course the primary key would be the related field. There may have been a third place where I feel a simular concept is used. What I am trying to figure out is since parents can have an indetermined number of kids, how does one best organize an undetermined number of variables as this. I know setting a table up with fields of kid1, kid2.... kid9, kid10 is ridiculous.
I am have used multi selct fieds before and found them to be useful. Since this database may use a few of them I wanted to see if better ideas were possible. As I said we only have Access to work with, other platforms may be better suited but not a tool we have. Any help is appreciated, thank you.