Possible to enter data in three dimensions?

[wes228]

I am relatively new to this. I am trying to design a database and need to store data in three dimensions. I have a list of faculty members at our university and need to record data about their salaries and the courses they teach. However, I also need to keep a record for each semester as well. I would like to have the faculty + salaries + courses laid out in a "Fall 2012 Semester" table, for example, and then stack the "Spring 2013" semester table on top of it, etc to make one three-dimensional table.

Otherwise, it appears that I will have to create a separate table for each semester and repeat the list of faculty members.

[ItsMe]

M-Theory suggests this is possible. You need to look at Access as a Relational Database Management System. This is actually the answer to your question. Access is an RDBMS.

So your two dimensional spreadsheets will in fact layer upward into a third dimension within an RDBMS because you can tie them together with relationships or what is known as Primary Keys represented by Foreign Keys. Some activity, of your choosing, can represent your semesters within one table because this table will hold a Key that represents a unique identifier within the table that describes the given record of the given semester's description.

[Dal Jeanis]

Okay, you're making your life difficult. Head over to Roger Carlson's site at http://rogersaccesslibrary.com and review his free tutorials on database design and application design.

The rule is, keep your "entities" separate, so that each table is meaningful and they can be linked to produce even more meaningful information. Staff members are one table. Staff member salaries are one table, with foreign key to the staff member and an attribute for the date that salary amount started, or perhaps instead with a foreign key to the semester it is relevant to (if your salaries usually change by semester or school year).

Classes in the abstract (as in the catalog information for English 101) are one table, whereas the particular classes that are scheduled and taught in any given semester are in a separate table, with linking tables that connect the class to one or more teacher(s), one or more room(s), a time schedule, and a bunch of students.

Also, there are several places that you can go to get "industry specific" database designs, rather than reinventing the wheel. Here's one http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/index.htm. It's worth having a look, rather than beating your head against a wall of "maybe's".

[ItsMe]

What he said

[Dal Jeanis]

Oh, what I forgot to said... say... was that, once you get your entities right, you can produce elegant three dimensional models (crosstabs) that give you exactly what you are asking for, without all the work of trying to make your tables themselves be inappropriately three dimensional. Each table is simple, but the combinations of tables represent the real world data accurately and succinctly.

That's why I said you were making your life difficult.

[ItsMe]

That's why I said you were making your life difficult.

I guess the multiverse approach may be exhaustive.

[Dal Jeanis]

And to debug... exhausting.