I have volunteered to design and develop an MS Access database for contacts at my local church in Jamaica, which has no budget to hire a database expert. I have attempted to design a database for the contacts, based on some requirements that I gleaned from the church leadership and administrators.
The church really wants to have a central place to store records on members, which they can delete/archive when members die or go away. They also wish to maintain records on marriages and anniversaries and emergency contacts. So I decided that the best approach is to focus on developing a contact database, that would include members, emergency contacts, non-member spouses of members, and other contacts that may be of service to the church and in turn the community served by the church.
Please help me to design a useful database by reviewing the table diagram attached. Any assistance would be useful.
Kind regards,
Kerry-Ann
Best Answer
The design looks OK to me, though I wouldn't store phone numbers as
INTEGER
s, because in reality they are character sequences.Since you want to track marriages of members, may be that should the parent for
marriages
, and notcontacts
.If a member passes away, you may still want to maintain his/her record with a flag, instead of deleting it. This will preserve marriage and reference records, as well as emergency contacts. To accommodate that you'd want to add the membership end date and the termination reason attributes.