Access® 2007 For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Keys, Relationships, and Indexes

In This Chapter

• Uniquely identifying your records with a primary key

• Understanding relationships

• Building relationships between your tables

• Indexing for faster queries

Life in today's world is all about doing things faster and more efficiently to increase productivity. Isn't that what your life is about? Oh, you have a life outside the office, too? Maybe you have a relationship? This chapter is about making your databases faster and about building good relationships (the database kind, not the human kind!).

As with any good relationship, the end result is often harmony and happiness. Making your Access tables work well together will make things so much easier in so many ways as you move on to build your queries, forms, and reports. The good news is that building relationships in Access takes a lot less time than building human relationships.

How can you make Access work faster and more efficiently? With key fields and indexes, that's how! Each table should have that one special field assigned as a primary key. A primary key prevents duplicate records from being entered into a table — hence, more efficient data entry. (I love the word hence!) To retrieve your data faster, you need to create the proper balance of indexes for each table. Not enough indexes, and querying 100,000 records will take forever; too many, and the same could be true. So, assigning indexes to the correct fields is an art form. You find out all about the art of indexes in ...