Database Design for Mere Mortals™: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design, Second Edition

Compiling a Complete List of Fields

The Preliminary Field List

Now that you have completed your analysis of the current database and the interviews with users and management, you can create a preliminary field list. This list represents the organization's fundamental data requirements and constitutes the core set of fields that you'll define in the database. You create the preliminary field list using a two-step process.

Step One: Review and Refine the List of Characteristics

The first step involves reviewing and refining the list of characteristics you compiled throughout the analysis and interview process. As you learned in Chapter 3, a field represents a characteristic of a particular subject; therefore, each item on your list ...