Best way to organize a small database of people?

[Orabidoo]

Hi everybody,

I work at a museum and my current project is to make a database app for looking up immigrants from a certain time span. I got the data as an Excel sheet and there are only ~5000 entries (although there's a lot of fields for each one). For a growing database I understand that it's important to put recurring data in a seperate table and use small 'pointers' to keep the size down, but that seems unnecessarily complicated in this case.

My plan is to do one big search query that pulls the desired entries from a single database using parameters from a form. Is this bad practice?

[redknite]

i guess i would need to know more information about what recurring data you have in a contact list. If it is only contact information you might not need to create a database....what type of queries would you like be using? Case examples would be great!