Database Design

As mentioned in the Preface, one purpose of this book is to explain the basic concepts of modern relational-database theory and show how these concepts are realized in Microsoft Access. Allow me to amplify on this rather lofty goal.

To take a very simple view, which will do nicely for the purposes of this introductory discussion, a database is just a collection of related data. A database management system , or DBMS, is a system that is designed for two main purposes:

If the data is simple and there is not very much of it, then a database can consist of a single table. In fact, a simple database can easily be maintained even with a word processor!