New Training: Understand Access Table Relationships

In this 11-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Ben Finkel covers how to design and organize tables in Microsoft Access.

We’ll take a low-level look at how to design and organize tables in Microsoft Access to make them as reliable and efficient as possible. Covering industry standard topics such as referential integrity and foreign keys learners will come away with knowledge applicable to all relational database management systems not just MS Access. Watch this new Microsoft 365,Microsoft Office training.

Watch the full course: Microsoft Access 2019 Training

This training includes:

• 11 videos

• 51 minutes of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Understanding Table Relationships

• Normalizing Your Database

• First Normal Form (1NF)

• Second Normal Form (2NF)

• Third Normal Form (3NF)

• Recognizing a Candidate Key

• One-to-Many Relationships

• One-to-One Relationships

• Many-to-Many Relationships

• Referential Integrity

• Understanding Table Relationships Summary

Why Good Databases Require Normalization

Relational databases, like MySQL, require a lot of prep work before implementation. Database engineers will need to take extra precautions to fully understand what their databases need to accomplish so they can properly organize data within them. One of the processes for organizing data in a relational database is normalization.

Normalization is the act of separating data in a database into various tables for core data components and creating representational links between those datasets.

Let's take a database holding user accounts into consideration. It might be easy to create a single table that holds data like the usernames, passwords, email addresses, etc. Storing all this information in a single table would be considered bad practice, though.

Instead, one table might hold the core information for that user account like their email address, name, username, etc. Another table would hold the login name (email address or username) and their password. Another table might include the login information and dates that the user signed in. Each of these tables will link to each other through primary and foreign keys (e.g. – the username).

Though the example above may be crude, it explains what a normalized database may look like. By organizing relational data in this way, databases can be maintained easier and expanded as needed in the future.