Hello,
I am working on a database containing information about people. Each person has some basic information, such as their name and position. The Basic Information table contains these records for each person, with a unique sequential number for each person as the primary key.
However, each person also has additional information about their previous positions, which is made up of a table with the dates and position title for each previous position they have held. I have this stored in a Positions table, where each record contains the date range, the position, and the identification number from the Basic Information Table.
There is another table, called Education, which similarly lists the date, school, and degree of any education this person attained, as well as the identification number from the Basic Information Table.
Finally, there is one last table, called Certifications, listing similar information on all certifications received for each person.
I have then linked the identification numbers from each table to the Basic Information table. The problem is that when I run a query for, say, people who have a PhD degree, and want to display only their names, I get a list containing the same name many times over; if I choose to display all information, I find that I am getting back all possible combinations. So what I get returned is a list of all the previous positions combined with their first certification, then all the previous positions combined with the second certification, and so on. So rather than get twenty names (of the twenty people who have PhDs), I get thousands of entries with the twenty names repeated.
I'm not sure if this is a problem in my table design and linking, or in my query design. If this is not clear, please let me know and I will give more concrete examples.
Thank you for your help.