In this section, we will outline a business example that will be used as a basis for the examples throughout the tutorial. In organizations, the job of analyzing the business and determining the appropriate database structure (tables and columns) is typically carried out by Systems Analysts. A Systems Analyst will gather information about how the business operates and will form a model of the data storage requirements. From this model, a database programmer will create the database tables and then work with the application developers to develop the rest of the database application.
For this tutorial, we will consider a simple banking business. The bank has many customers who open and maintain one or more accounts. For each Customer, we keep a record of their name and address. We also assign them a unique CustomerID. We assign this unique identifier both for convenience and for accuracy. It is much easier to identify a single customer using their CustomerID rather than by looking up their full name and address. In addition, it is possible for the bank to have two customers with the same name (e.g., Bill Smith). In such cases, the unique CustomerID can always be used to tell them apart.
In a similar fashion, all accounts are assigned a unique account number. An account can be either a checking account or a savings account. Savings accounts earn interest but the only transactions allowed are deposits and withdrawals. Checking accounts do not earn interest. We maintain the date that the account was opened. This helps us track our customers and can be useful for marketing purposes. Finally, we maintain the current balance of an account.
In the previous section, we gave the structure and some sample data for the Customer table and the Accounts table. These will be used to support the data storage part of our Banking application.
In any database application, each of the tables requires a means to get data into them and retrieve the data at a later time. The primary way to get data into tables is to use data entry forms. The primary ways to get data back out of tables or to display data in tables are to use queries or reports.
For this tutorial, we will create a data entry form for each table, a query for each table and a report for each table.
In the following sections, we will first introduce how to start Access and how to create a new database.