Microsoft® Access® 2010 Inside Out

An Application Design Strategy

The two major schools of thought on designing databases are process-driven design (also known as top-down design), which focuses on the functions or tasks you need to perform, and data-driven design (also known as bottom-up design), which concentrates on identifying and organizing all the bits of data you need. The method we describe here incorporates some of the best ideas from both philosophies.

The method we like to use starts by identifying and grouping tasks to decide whether you need only one database or more than one database. (This is a top-down approach.) As explained previously, databases should be organized around a group of related tasks, or functions. For each task, you choose the individual elements ...