John Beeler,
These days I wash dishes for a meal, so working for Ramen isn't far off the
mark. My personal favorite variation is red miso, home-made chicken stock,
diced chicken breast, and diced green onions. But enough about my new
career.
The entities you mention are STRUCTURE, LOT, and DATE. With DATE there are
quite a few built in functions to manipulate dates, do calculation on them,
parse them, format them, etc. I happen to like Ralph Kimball's suggestion
that if dates & times are a major player in a database design it makes sense
to build a table with all the dates and all the elements of dates that might
be used to summarize the data--days, weeks, months, quarters, years, and
whatever all stored in a table as an end result. For STRUCTURE & LOT you
have to ask, "What is it about structures and lots I want to report on or
analyze?" This will help you work out a list of attributes (fields or
columns in the entity (table)) that you need. The last question is whether
there are numeric measures you want to analyze. Typically there is at least
a column in the fact table with the number 1 stored in it so that counting
is a matter of summing this column. I couldn't tell you why but it seems
that sums are faster than counts. Fact table? Yup. This is a table with a
single column each containing a value that matches a value in the STRUCTURE,
LOT & DATE tables which uniquely identify each structure, lot & date. This
way you can look at structures by lot & date, lot by structure & date, date
by structure & lot, etc.
Someone else posted sample SQL to build the database. I haven't done so
because that's too much like consulting and I get paid for that. Also, this
group is educational and part of being a good teacher is to give enough
material to get a student started but not enough that the job is done. It's
up to the student to finish what a teacher starts in an assignment. I've
given you enough that you could work out on paper what your tables will be
and what fields each table will have. Now it's up to you to do the rest.
I'll follow this thread and answer any more questions you have.
"John Beeler" <jo********@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:11**********************@z14g2000cwz.googlegr oups.com...
I would like to be able to enter in a structure, the range of dates it
existed, and the lot number (there are 19 lots around the Circle, but
I'm planning on technically counting the center Circle itself as a lot
- so 20). I would enter something like:
English Opera House; September 1880 - December 1916; Lots 17, 18, 19
Then, later one be able to type in a date and have Access show me the
entire composition of the Circle.