Database design containing daily data

[Guest]

I work for a water distribution company and am faced with the task of
designing a database to analyze flows in the system in order to track water
rights and maintenance issues. This entails about 30 sites with a flow total
for each day over the course of a year. I want to be able to analyze any
number of these sites for any given period of the year, so monthly totals are
not an option. My primary question is how do I go about forming my tables?
Should I build one big table for all the daily flows for all the sites (about
11000 individual flows)? Or would it be better to split them up somehow?
I'm very new at this and appreciate any help you could give me.

 

[Jeff Boyce]

Kyle

The amount of your data should not be the primary determiner of how you
organize your tables. Access is a relational database, so to get the best
out of its features and functions, you'll need to look into normalizing your
data. If these are foreign terms (relational, normalizing), you'll either
need to do a bit more studying, or may want to look for another approach.

How is it that you've already settled on Access?

 

[John Nurick]

Hi Kyle,

Typically you'd have one table for Sites, with one record for each site,
and a related table storing all the daily readings for all the sites.

It's then possible to build queries that will analyse the data just
about any way you can think of.