A dental patient record structure is obviously going to be very different from a gynaecologists. The answer to this is rather complex, at the present time it is safe to say that both science and art play a part. If the tables were designed from a object model they are frequently already normalised. Normalisation will be covered in depth in a more advanced course offered. These course notes provide details in an appendix.
Normalisation is an extremely important process ensuring that a database can actually work.
Although databases can be paper based most are computer based. Assess and Paradox are two such DBMSs. Meta Data Actions Queries Reporting Obviously each supplier constantly tries to outdo the others in offering more and more features however we will concentrate on the basic ones described above. All this additional information is called meta data and is very useful when you want to find out certain details. Unfortunately access does not do this anywhere near as well as Paradox, which is a DBMS from Borland, Microsoft's main competitor.