Much is bantered about business process re-engineering and the structure of technology as the backbone of process redesign. However, this cause-effective thinking is not only misguided but dangerous. All too often, technology is thought of as the great solution to make current business process better. It is against this backdrop that radical database design finds its moorings. A relational database is the most efficient way to store your data so that there is no duplication, and relationships between data tables mimic the relationships between people and organizations.
Typical relationships are one too many, where one parent entity has many children.
Designing and building a relational database are the most important tasks of any information system. The quality and type of data you store are also very important. For example, your data field formats should all be the same throughout the database. All these decisions should be made during the initial design of the database. For every member, the database can have multiple contacts, as the example shows.