Not new to access but new to doing it the right way

[jgaard]

Hi

I've been working with access since back in the days where access as well as windows arrived on 3½" disks.
So I'm not new to access.

Now I need to use access to make my job easier.
And the complexity makes it necessary to work this out by doing it the ACCESS way.
Until now I have worked in huge spreadsheet like databases.
My current database does the job but not very well. It contains the following columns:

ID, CI, Location, Room, Rack, Unit, 
Nic1 Switch, Nic1 port, NIC1 patch, NIC1 cross, 
Nic2 Switch, Nic2 port, NIC2 patch, NIC2 cross,
Nic3 Switch, Nic3 port, NIC3 patch, NIC3 cross, 
Nic4 Switch, Nic4 port, NIC4 patch, NIC4 cross, 
MGMT Switch, MGMT port, MGMT patch, MGMT cross,
SAN1 Director, SAN1 port, SAN2 Director, SAN2 port.

As I said a HUGE spreadsheet design.

Now I’m thinking I need to learn to make a correct DB design.
But how many database tabels do I need. I need to break it up in smaller bits. And I would love to add dependencies.
If we take what I hope to be the easy part…. For starters.

Location, Room, Rack, Unit

Location: There are 2 locations
Room: there are 5 rooms at location 1 (1-5) and 4 rooms at location 2 (a-d)


Racks: the number of racks and configurations vary from room to room no to rooms are alike, but I would love to be able to have the rack divided into rooms so that in Room 5 I can not choose rack 2-21 because this rack is only present in Room D. But 2-1 may be present at both locations and in all rooms.
Unit: Every rack has 42 units.

Later every unit may carry one CI and each and every CI may carry the information about af many as 4 nics, managment cable and SAN.

I hope some one can explain the basics so that I can do a correct design.

Kind Regards JGaaard

[orange]

This is a great tutorial to design a database (tables and relationships) to meet your business needs.
It has answers and forms to assist. Lot's of additional info at the base site.

Good luck.