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Database design

As you may have seen on the example page, many databases contain multiple tables. When designing a database, it is important that the data can be stored as efficiently as possibly. In many cases, that is not possible in a single table, which is why a program like Microsoft Excel is usually not suitable for storing (complex) data. A badly designed database can result in (many) data redundancies and can, in the worst case, lead to an unusable collection of data. It is therefore very important to give serious consideration to the design of your database at an early stage of a research project. You can contact the The faculty's ICT Support Unit to get advise on this subject.

Entity-relationship diagram for a music album review database design. [Source: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/spatialdb/l2_p5.html]

See the page about data modelling in this Workbench for more information about this subject. The section about the database model is particulartly relevant in this respect and contains a number of links to further information on this subject.

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