School Enrollment Database

[jpepin]

Hey everyone, I'm a beginner at MS Access and I'm designing a database for some coursework.

This project is for a Dance studio which offers multiple courses each semester for its students. What I have now is:

Student(StudentID#,...)
Courses(Course#,CourseName,TuitionFee,StartDate,EndDate)
Enrolled([StudentID#],[Course#]) -bridge entity

I believe this will work, but it could get tedious to re-enter some of the same classes every semester. Also, couldn't there be inquery issues with all the redundant data over time?

The end goal of all this data is to generate a course roster, and track a student's Balance for fees owed to the studio.

What I do like about this is that Enrolling is a cinch, shortning significant data entry time. My only thought was to create a "Semester" entity, but I don't know how to bridge all 3 of these b/c of all the many to many relationships. How do colleges and high schools store their data of who's enrolled in what, when?

Any suggestions would be awesome. Thanks!

[TheShabz]

That looks right to me. Compound key is done properly. As far as having that junction table so big it becomes hard to query, I believe they purge (soft delete) entries for students who are no longer at the school. What I would do is have an ActiveStudentIndicator in my Students table, then at the end of each semester/year, send inactive student records to an archive table/db.

One thing as far as naming convention goes, replace # with Num. having special characters in your field names is generally a no-no.